Novelist Charged After Calling Poland’s President ‘Moron’ on Facebook

Jakub Żulczyk, a TV writer and novelist in Poland, has been charged with calling Poland’s President Andrzej Duda a “moron” on Facebook. Żulczyk faces up to three years in prison over the insult.

Żulczyk, a 37-year-old writer whose 2014 novel Blinded by the Lights was adapted for TV and aired on HBO Europe in 2018, wrote the offending post on November 7 of last year, according to the Guardian, but the charges were only brought by the Polish government this month.

Żulczyk was reportedly responding to President Duda’s comments following the November 3 presidential election in the U.S., an election won by President Joe Biden. Duda had refused to acknowledge Biden as the duly elected president of the country and said that he was still waiting for Biden’s “nomination by the Electoral College.”

“Joe Biden is the 46th president of the USA,” Żulczyk wrote on Facebook on November 7, according to the BBC. “Andrzej Duda is a moron.”

President Duda, a dangerous neo-fascist, was an ally of President Donald Trump, as virtually every wannabe dictator around the world seemed to be. Duda, a member of Poland’s Law and Justice Party, ran for a second term in 2020 on an anti-gay platform where he said LGBT equality was “worse than communism.” Another slogan, “LGBT are not people” was also tremendously popular with supporters of the Law and Justice Party in 2020.

Poland has nine different laws covering insults, according to the BBC, and people can be imprisoned for not just insulting government leaders, but for offensive speech against national symbols such as flags. Polish prosecutors called Żulczyk’s Facebook post “offensive,” though acknowledge he hasn’t admitted any wrongdoing.

“I am, I suspect, the first writer in this country in a very long time to be tried for what he wrote,” Żulczyk wrote on Facebook on Monday.