By Archis Chowdhury
A video purportedly showing three women fighting back against a group of men, after being assaulted by them, is being shared with Islamophobic captions claiming that the video shows three girls in a Paris metro underpass fighting back against a group of Muslim immigrants who tried to molest them.
BOOM found these claims to be false; our fact-check reveals that the video shows a fight that was staged and shot by Campus Univers Cascades (CUC) - a stunt team based in France.
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Several users on X and Facebook shared the video with Islamophobic tropes that suggest that the male assailants in the video are Muslim immigrants.
A viral caption states, "This video is so soothing….Yesterday somewhere in Paris on a Metro Underpass.. A few Migrants were doing what they do best ... Taharrush (roughly translates to mass molestation of women)... Unfortunately for these migrants, these 3 women were all serving French para-military."
Click here, here and here to view some of these posts.
The video was also shared on Facebook with the same claim, which can be viewed here.
Fact Check
Going through the comments, BOOM noticed that many users were questioning whether the fight seen in the video was real or choreographed.
Doing a frame-by-frame analysis, we found one of the men in the video wearing a hoodie with a logo that says CUC.
Taking cue from this, we did a keyword search with "CUC fight", which led us to several Facebook videos by a group of France-based stunt people called Campus Univers Cascade showing fighting tutorials.
One of the video showed a choreographed street fight between female MMA fighters against a few men (view here).
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We combed through CUC's Instagram page, and found the viral video being shared on their page on November 2, 2023. The video was shared with hashtags like #stuntteam #stuntlife and #choreography# which suggested that the fight was staged, and not real.
BOOM reached out to Lucas Dollfus, the founder of CUC, who confirmed to us that the video was in fact staged, and did not show a real life scenario.
Speaking to BOOM over Instagram, Dollfus said, "This is indeed a video made with stuntmen from our school: Campus Univers Cascades. It's a staged video and of course it's fake, everything is choreographed and prepared in advance. The aim of the work is to be realistic... it seems to have worked too well."
"We are sorry that this is being misused and shared for the wrong cause," he added, after being informed of the Islamophobic claims that were being shared with the video.
