Comedian Gad Elmaleh Faces Fresh Plagiarism Allegations in Multi-Country Investigation

The thorough investigation on Gad Elmaleh, titled "Gad and the malaise", was published on Thursday, July 11, 2019, in the magazine Society. It is a summary of testimonies collected during reports that took place in Montreal, Casablanca, Los Angeles, Marseille and Paris, reports Le Figaro.

The downfall of the Franco-Moroccan comedian began at the beginning of 2019. The YouTube channel CopyComics, owned by a certain Ben, publishes a compilation of Gad Elmaleh’s sketches. The comments explode.

Kamel Bennafla, a 62-year-old comedian from Marseille, remembers that the paternity of "Le Bond" was attributed to Gad Elmaleh, to his great surprise, when he had played this famous sketch many years later. Yet it is a sketch that he claims to have created towards the end of the 1990s. He was a star who gave a helping hand to the young comedian Gad Elmaleh at the time.

In the land of Uncle Sam, more precisely in Los Angeles, Kelly Carlin, daughter of the late American comedian George Carlin, testifies: "That a personality of the caliber of this gentleman [Gad Elmaleh], famous and recognized, should allow himself to steal, word for word, a piece of my father’s work without the slightest scruple, the slightest regret, is astonishing".

For now, Le Figaro, which claims to have asked Gad Elmaleh to react to the Society article, has received no response from the comedian whose return to the stage is becoming increasingly compromised.