A Turkish stand-up comedian has gone on trial in Istanbul, charged with insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a live comedy performance in June.
Deniz Goktas, 32, was arrested on July 3, days after a YouTube recording of his “Dead Sea” show accumulated nearly 9 million views.
Shorter clips posted on X gained similar rapid traction, drawing scrutiny from authorities and ultimately triggering a formal prosecution against the performer.
Goktas has been held in pretrial detention since July, and his case has drawn international attention as a test of free expression in Turkey.
Around 50 protesters gathered outside the Istanbul courtroom on Monday in pouring rain, chanting “Deniz Goktas is not alone” as the trial opened.
Supporters, journalists, fellow comedians from Istanbul’s TuzBiber club, and observers from the Dutch embassy and US consulate were also present at the courthouse.
Goktas faces multiple charges, including insulting Erdogan, inciting public hatred and hostility through jokes about Islam, and praising crime and criminals.
The third charge was added by prosecutors and is tied to a joke about an organized crime family known as the Daltons, which Goktas publicly addressed from his cell.
“A 90-minute show spawns a new charge every two months,” Goktas wrote in late August, adding that prosecutors had charged him “for a joke about the Daltons.”
Because Turkish courts can issue consecutive rather than concurrent sentences for multiple convictions, Goktas could theoretically face several years in prison if found guilty on all counts.
On the eve of his trial, Goktas referenced his court appearance in a social media post, writing: “After 88 days, I’ll be handcuffed for the first time and hear a car horn. I’m definitely not missing the handcuffs, but let’s see if I’ve missed the car horn.”
The indictment identifies specific material from the show as exceeding permissible speech, including Goktas describing Erdogan as a “shy dictator” who had undergone “a transition to a dictator who is at peace with his own identity.”
Erdogan is named as the sole complainant in the case, though prosecutors cited more than 500 applications to prosecute the comedian, according to the Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA), a Turkish NGO.
Among the groups that filed a complaint was the government-sponsored Presidency of Religious Affairs, better known as Diyanet, which flagged content from the performance.
The MLSA noted that jokes alleged to incite hatred targeted fundamentalist Islam, including references to women in full-coverage swimsuits as “divers” and a quip about “suicide bombers who fast.”
Turkey nominally upholds a secular constitution with guarantees of free expression, but the EU and US have repeatedly criticized how those standards are applied in practice.
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom stated in a 2022 report that Erdogan’s government increasingly relied on speech-based prosecution to “silence individuals who express criticism in religious terms, disclose beliefs or a lack thereof that differ from those of the majority of the population, or engage with religion in a way perceived as ‘mocking’ or ‘irreverent.'”
Erdogan’s litigious approach to criticism is not limited to domestic targets, having previously pursued German TV comedian Jan Böhmermann through the courts roughly a decade ago.
The Goktas trial is part of a broader crackdown on dissent, with hundreds of politicians, artists, musicians, journalists, and LGBTQ activists among those facing detention or prosecution in recent years.
Turkey, a NATO member and EU membership candidate, routinely tries individuals on speech-related offenses, particularly those perceived as insulting its president, who has held power since 2003.
