A Tunisian member of parliament was sentenced Friday to a year in prison for sexually harassing a schoolgirl, the victim’s lawyer said, in a case that sparked a nationwide #Metoo movement, IgbereTV reports.
Zouhair Makhlouf, an independent member of the suspended assembly, was photographed in October 2019 apparently masturbating in his car in the coastal city of Nabeul.
The high school student who took the photos and published them on social media, who was a minor at the time, said he had followed her to school and pressed charges of sexual harassment and indecent assault.
Makhlouf, who was wearing a T-shirt of the Qalb Tounes party of which he was a member at the time, had his trousers down and was looking at the camera.
He argued throughout the trial that he is diabetic and had needed to urgently urinate in a bottle.
The victim’s lawyer, Naima Chabbouh, said Makhlouf had been found guilty of indecent assault after a court session that went late into Thursday evening.
The images of Makhlouf, which went viral on social media, sparked an unprecedented outpouring of testimonies of sexual harassment.
Many women used the hashtag #EnaZeda — Tunisian Arabic for “me too” — an echo of the #MeToo movement sparked by the Harvey Weinstein affair in the United States in 2017.
Makhlouf was originally charged with sexual harassment before the indictment was reduced to indecent exposure before it was bumped up again under public pressure.
