BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (JTA) — A discrimination case in Argentina against the Venezuelan actress and model Catherine Fulop, who compared supporters of President Nicolas Maduro to Jews who helped the Nazis during the Holocaust, has been reopened.
The federal Justice Department has accused Fulop of a hate crime for violating the country’s anti-discriminatory law. Argentina’s appeals court decided in late November to reopen the case and appoint a special prosecutor.
In May, Fulop said that Jews were “fierce torturers of their own people” during a radio interview held on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. In talking about Venezuelan supporters of the Maduro regime, she said that some Jews also collaborated with Adolf Hitler, calling them “sapos” instead of the correct term kapos, or collaborators.
“Why do you think Hitler survived, because he did it all alone? No, because among the Jews there were the worst, the torturers inside the concentration camps. The ‘sapos’ were the Jews themselves who tortured their own people. This is happening in Venezuela,” Fulop said on the most listened-to news program on AM radio in Argentina.
The phrase triggered strong criticism on social media and the Argentine Jewish political umbrella DAIA condemned the celebrity’s statement.
Fulop later apologized in a tweet to her more than 1.6 million followers. Prosecutor Mariela De Minicis closed the case after the apology.
But Argentina has had an anti-discriminatory law on the books since 1988 and Jewish attorney Jorge Monastersky filed a complaint naming himself the victim of discriminatory behavior by Fulop.
The appeals court accepted the attorney’s complaint and reopened the case, ruling that the anti-discriminatory law was violated, and sent the case to city prosecutor Gustavo Galante, who specializes in discriminatory crimes, to rule.
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