How do we speak about sexual assaults?

This paper analyzes the written French media coverage of four cases of public denunciations of sexual assault that occurred during #MeToo movements and that involve public personalities, namely Julien Lacroix, Maripier Morin, Gilbert Rozon, and Éric Salvail. Using a Critical Discourse Analysis approach (Fairclough, 1995; van Dijk, 1988), we consider linguistic features that have been analyzed previously in a mostly English body of research on media discourse surrounding sexual assault cases (e.g., Clark, 1992; Henley et al., 1995; Tranchese, 2023), such as grammatical voice and lexical choices. We use data from 526 articles retrieved from three influential newspapers in Québec, namely La Presse, Le Devoir, and Journal de Montréal. We observe that these linguistic resources tend to reduce the perceived responsibility of the perpetrators by casting them as victims of the public denunciations.