Paraguayan senator Celeste Amarilla's attempt to distance herself from a week of racist social media posts took a farcical turn on Friday when she announced her Instagram account had been hacked — then posted again hours later to tell France to "keep on annoying me."
The sequence of events tells you everything. This wasn't a hacking. This was damage control that immediately unravelled.
What actually happened
It started after France eliminated Paraguay 1-0 in the Round of 16. Amarilla went after Mbappé on social media, calling him a "colonised Cameroonian, desperately trying to pass himself off as French" and a "brute who had not learned to write." Mbappé responded by calling her a "despicable woman" guilty of "brazen racism" — and that's when the institutional dominoes started falling.
French prosecutors opened a formal investigation following a complaint from the French Football Federation. The offense carries up to one year in prison and a €45,000 fine. Paraguay's Senate publicly distanced itself from her remarks. So did the Paraguayan government. FIFA president Gianni Infantino stated that "all of football and society stand in solidarity with the France captain." The UN human rights office weighed in. The WHO director-general weighed in. At some point, you have to ask: when this many institutions are pointing in one direction, what exactly is there left to dispute?
Amarilla's own responses have been contradictory to the point of being incoherent. She expressed regret for using insults she'd personally experienced as a mixed-race woman. She simultaneously demanded Mbappé apologize to her. She conceded her comments "were racist" and "unfortunate," then threatened him with a lawsuit for criminal defamation under Paraguayan law, framing his response as "gender-based violence."
Mbappé, meanwhile, is scoring goals
While this circus was playing out off the pitch, Mbappé scored in France's 2-0 quarterfinal win over Morocco on Thursday, drawing level with Lionel Messi at the top of the Golden Boot race. France are in the semifinals. The senator is explaining Instagram outages.
Her attorney is apparently exploring whether Mbappé's public rebuke constitutes defamation under Paraguayan law. French prosecutors are exploring whether her original posts constitute a criminal offense under French law. Those are not equivalent situations.
"I'm trying to build a different Celeste Amarilla," she told reporters. That's a line for a memoir, not a press conference. The investigation is already open. The courts will decide what comes next, not the rebranding.
