South African opera star Pretty Yende on Tuesday accused French customs agents of treating her with “outrageous racial discrimination” at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport, a claim strongly contested by police and airport sources.
“Police brutality is real for someone who looks like me,” the soprano, who is black, wrote on her Instagram account a day after arriving for a string of performances in Paris.
Yende, 36, said she was “traumatized” after being “stripped and searched like a criminal offender” at the airport.
“I am one of the very very lucky ones to be alive to see the day today even with ill-treatment and outrageous racial discrimination and psychological torture and very offensive racial comments in a country that I’ve given so much of my heart and virtue to,” she wrote.
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Yende did not say why she was pulled aside for questioning, but a French police source said the singer had arrived from Milan on a South African passport without a visa.
She added, “I’m still shaken thinking that I am one in a million who managed to come out of that situation alive because of one phone call I thought of at the time as I was in shock and traumatized and couldn’t believe what was happening to me. They took all my belongings including my cellphone and told me to write down phone numbers of my close family and friends to call with a landline phone they had on the retention cell, they said they were going to take me to a ‘prison hotel’ in the meantime while they looked at me like I was a criminal offender. I said, my phone battery is dying, might you have a charger by any chance? The police officer said ‘listen to me carefully, you will not have your phone… I said what…he continued, listen to me until I finish with a very harsh and condescending tone… I replied…’ am I a prisoner? … he rudely said yes…”.
Denial and her release
“At no moment were there any incidents,” the source said, adding that Yende had not been asked to remove her clothes.
She was released an hour and a half later with a visa allowing her to enter French territory, an airport source said, adding that Yende was held for “verification” purposes that had nothing to do with the color of her skin.
Yende, who was born in the small South African town of Piet Retief, has enjoyed a meteoric rise over the past decade, starring in operas from Vienna and Berlin to Barcelona and Los Angeles.
Support from various artists
Numerous artists showed support for the soprano including Aida Garifullina, Nadine Sierra, Yusif Eyvazov, Joesph Calleja, Angel Blue, Isabel Leonard, Angela Gheorghiu, J’Nai Bridges, and Jamie Barton, among others.