cause célèbre

By that fall, Drakeo had become a cause célèbre.

“To protect smelt from water pumps, government regulators have flushed 1.4 trillion gallons of water into the San Francisco Bay since 2008,” the Wall Street Journal reported in a spectacularly uninformed column in 2015 that libeled the fish as “the cause célèbre of environmentalists and bête noire of parched farmers.”

Daniel Penny, who became a conservative cause celebre, was pictured attending the Army v Navy American football game near Washington DC with Trump and Vice-President-elect JD Vance.

Not surprisingly, the grave miscarriage of justice in his case has attracted national and international attention and made it a cause célèbre for people opposed to the death penalty and many supporters of capital punishment.

As doubts about the sailors' guilt grew, their families began a campaign on their behalf, which became a cause célèbre in Brazil.