Étienne Gernelle

Étienne Gernelle (born May 3, 1976 in Paris) is a French journalist and the director of the weekly magazine Le Point.

Biography Youth and education Étienne Gernelle is the son of an agronomy engineer who worked for the World Bank and the United Nations in Togo, who died when Étienne was twelve years old. His mother raised him with his three sisters.

He became a boarding school student at Poitiers and then attended the Lycée Saint-Jean de Passy. He was admitted to the Paris Institute of Political Studies on his fourth attempt and graduated from the 2001 class.

In 2000, he embarked on a year-long cycling trip from Samarkand (Uzbekistan) to Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia), covering a distance of 3,500 km, with an average of 10 km per day.

Career He worked at Libération, He interviewed various personalities on BFM TV such as Harlem Désir, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet and Marine Le Pen and appeared on LCI Matin.

In May 2018, following an issue of Le Point featuring a cover photo of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan titled "The dictator. How far will Erdogan go? Investigation into the Turkish president, his megalomania, his networks in France, his offensive on Algeria, his crimes..." Gernelle says he was the target of a harassment campaign by Erdoğan's supporters and his AK Party, and had received death threats. The editorial staff of Le Point, Le Pontet (a suburb of Avignon), Valence and Lyon and in Valence.

Political positions He advocates for liberal reforms in the French economy, viewing France as a "little Soviet Union."

Mediapart claims that his takeover at Le Point was accompanied by a sharp turn of the magazine towards far-right ideology, with increased presence of conspiracy theory and far-right discourse, as well as numerous lapses in professional ethics, some of which have been penalized by the justice system. In his capacity as director of publication for Le Point, he has been convicted in some of these cases. The same parties were convicted again in 2022 after another article that reported a non-existent complaint filing in Belgium, suggesting that she "filed rape complaints without any foundation."

Published works