French court fines world’s top perfumer over racism

Mar 30, 2012 - Dorothee Moisan |

Paris

A Paris court on Thursday found Jean-Paul Guerlain, the former “nose” behind the world-famous perfume brand, guilty of racial insults over his televised remarks about “negroes”, and fined him.

Asked in a 2010 interview about how he created the Samsara scent, Guerlain replied: “For once, I set to work like a negro. I don’t know if negroes have always worked like that, but anyway...”
The court judged that the second part of his reply was racist and fined him 6,000 euros ($8,000). The maximum penalty it could have imposed was six months in prison and a 22,500-euro fine.
Guerlain was also ordered to pay 2,000 euros in damages to each of three anti-racist groups that were civil plaintiffs in the case. The 75-year-old heir to one of the world’s oldest perfume houses was not in co-urt for the verdict.

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