Brigette Bardot became a sex symbol and star as a young woman and her unique looks and style created a new image for French starlets. Although Bardot had an amazing career, it wasn’t a long one and before she was 40, she had grown tired of the fame and attention and retired to a beach house in St. Tropez.

While everyone is familiar with Bardot’s good looks and laidback attitude, few people really know much about her. Bardot preferred to keep her personal life private and has stayed under the radar since her retirement in 1973.

Now 79, Bardot is still spunky and opinionated, but her opinions have gotten her into trouble over the years. In fact, in the last 10 years Bardot has been arrested and prosecuted for inciting racial hatred five times.

Most of her racial slurs are directed at Muslims. Just a few years ago, Bardot had complained to the president of France that she felt that Muslims were being cruel to goats because of the way they slit their throats when they slaughter them. She felt as though there could have been a more humane and faster way of doing so.

Bardot also made comments about the Muslim population in France saying she was tired of being “under the thumb of the population which is destroying us, destroying our country, and imposing its habits.”

Bardot later wrote a book in which she condemned people who are gay, unemployed and foreign. Luckily, Bardot was not sentenced to prison for her comments in the book, but she did receive a $40,000 fine.

According to Michèle Finck on freespeechdebate.com, Bardot made her racial comments a habit and has been arrested for inciting racial hatred on several other occasions.

“In 1997, first offence, using a newspaper column to complain of the ‘foreign overpopulation’ of France. In 2000, she was convicted for having written in her book Pluto’s Square that ‘my country, France, my homeland, my land is again invaded by an overpopulation of foreigners, especially Muslims.’ In 2004, she was found guilty for having published another book, A Cry in the Silence, in which she established a generalized link between Islam and the terrorist attacks that took place on 11 September 2001.”

What do you think of Bardot’s racial comments?

Image via Wikimedia Commons