On March 31, 2025, a Paris criminal court found Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Rassemblement National and leading presidential contender, guilty of embezzling European Union funds.[1] She was sentenced to four years in prison (two of which are suspended), fined €100,000, and banned from holding public office for five years with intermediate enforcement, which could end her candidacy in the 2027 presidential election if the sentence is confirmed by the Court of Appeal, at a time when she had been polling at around 37%.[2]
The verdict triggered an intimidation campaign against the presiding judge, Bénédicte de Perthuis, and prosecutors, featuring death threats on far-right websites that spread across TikTok and VK. By April 2, de Perthuis and the prosecutors had been placed under police protection.[3] Authorities tracked down five individuals who had made threats. One, a 76-year-old retiree who posted an image of the judge alongside a guillotine, received an eight-month suspended sentence and a €3,000 fine.[4] As the threats against the judiciary did not emerge overnight, one wonders why so many organizations wait for a crisis before calling for professional protection.
While this affair shocked France, such reactions have become grimly familiar in the United States. In 2022, when the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade spurred death threats, an armed California man was arrested outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home. Prosecutors noted the only thing that had stopped him was the sight of Kavanaugh’s 24-hour security detail.[5] In December 2025, NBC News published a story on how judges who had ruled against Trump Administration initiatives have had their lives changed by harassment and threats, noting how these judges took action “to adapt to the changing landscape by upgrading home security systems,” changing their commutes, and limiting the information family members post online.[6]
These sound measures taken to ‘harden perimeter defenses’ mirror the advice we give our corporate clients. Equally as important, however, is the need to develop intelligence on those seeking to cause harm. We frequently advise our clients that, although our team is well positioned to protect them, it is critical we understand the threat from which we are protecting them. When formulating a security plan, it is critical to collect and analyze threat information gathered from open source reporting, social media posts, and sites featuring user-generated content.
Locating and removing exposed personal information that can be exploited by threat actors is an important layer of security. While US judges enjoy the protection of the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act of 2021 – legislation named for a judge’s slain son that protects judges’ personally identifiable information from resale by data brokers and prevents publication of personal information by other businesses and individuals lacking a legitimate public interest – others in the public eye lack such statutory protection.[7] For them, there is a bona fide need to prevent online publication of, or to locate and take down, sensitive personal data, such as information that may expose their whereabouts. We routinely work with clients to locate this type of information on the surface web, on the deep web, and on the dark web, and to have it taken down to frustrate threat actors who might use it for nefarious purposes.
The threats against de Perthuis and her colleagues in France, like those directed at members of the US judiciary, are not isolated events. They represent the global growth of a troubling phenomenon, politically motivated violence; a scourge from which major Western democracies had been mostly immune. The anonymity afforded by social media has only accelerated this trend of threats, harassment, doxxing, and even targeted violent attacks. Just as these judges and prosecutors uphold their duties no matter the popular reaction, so should we uphold our duty to protect them from harassment and targeted violence.
