Je Suis Coco

A survivor of the Charlie Hebdo attack is ready to tell her story. Here’s why we should listen.

Run until you can’t run, they say. Hide until you can’t hide. Fight until you can’t fight.

But what if they’ve just got you?

Six years ago, two terrorists assassinated twelve people in the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Eleven others were injured. And one young woman — Corinne “Coco” Rey — feared that she had become, in her own words, “a monster.”

Coco, as she is known professionally, was a cartoonist for Charlie Hebdo. There was little information about her in the press, even though her story was central to the narrative. She stepped out of the office at just the wrong time to pick up her child from daycare, only to find herself face-to-face with two armed men. They called her by her name — “Coco!” — and forced her to open the door. She punched in the security code, giving them access to the Charlie Hebdo office. She survived the shooting.

That was it — that’s all we knew.

Having spent the past several decades in the U.S., I had grown accustomed to American disaster coverage, where every detail is pursued and dissected with excruciating precision. As it turns out, respect is an option for crime victims in the European press: for all the mystery and pain in Coco’s story…