A complaint for attempted rape was filed Monday against the Minister of Solidarity Damien Abad, who immediately replied by announcing a complaint for slanderous denunciation.
The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed to AFP that it had received a complaint on Monday for attempted rape targeting Mr. Abad, revealed by Mediapart, specifying that it was “currently being analyzed”.
According to the investigation site, she was filed by an “elected centrist”, who accuses the minister of having tried to rape her during a party organized at his home in Paris in the first half of 2010.
“Once again, I strongly contest any accusation of attempted rape or sexual assault,” said Mr. Abad in a written statement sent to the press.
“I will not leave these false and outrageous accusations unanswered. From that day on, I asked my lawyers to file a complaint for slanderous denunciation,” he added.
“It’s an attempt to intimidate other victims,” reacted to AFP Me Raphaële Bialkiewicz, the complainant’s lawyer, assuring that the latter was “serene”.
“My client has spoken so that it does not happen again, she responds to the call of Elisabeth Borne” who had invited women victims of sexual violence to file a complaint in mid-June, said Me Bialkiewicz. “She has the intimate conviction that it is necessary to free the voice of women”.
In mid-June, Mediapart had published the testimony of this woman under the assumed name of “Laëtitia”.
She was, at the time of the facts that she denounces, president of a federation of the youth movement of the New Center, of which Mr. Abad, then MEP, was the national president.
On the evening of the events, according to her account, Damien Abad “offered her a glass” at the bottom of which she saw “something”: suspicious, she went to spit out her sip in the toilet.
Still according to her, Mr. Abad was waiting for her behind the door and everything went “very quickly”: the MEP would have “pushed her into a room opposite” then tried to force her to perform oral sex.
“I was scared, I was flabbergasted. I struggled, I hit him in the stomach,” she says.
“Laëtitia” says she was finally able to “get rid of” her alleged attacker and leave the room thanks to the irruption of a guest.
She is the third woman to accuse the minister of sexual violence, but to date no investigation has been opened into these accusations.
One of them, Margaux (first name changed) – who confirmed her story to AFP – filed a complaint twice, but these two complaints were dismissed in 2012, then in 2017, first for “lack of the complainant”, then “lack of sufficiently serious infringement”.
For the other, Chloé, who denounced facts that allegedly took place during a party in the fall of 2010, a report had been made by the Observatory of sexist and sexual violence, but the Paris prosecutor’s office had indicated the end may not open an investigation “as is”, for lack of “element allowing the identification of the victim of the facts denounced”.
His testimony had indeed been transmitted to justice in an anonymized form.
Filing a complaint could therefore change the situation.
Since the publication of testimonies in Mediapart relaying the accusations of rape, several anonymous testimonies from members of LR have also reported “heavy” or even “inappropriate” behavior by the minister, supposedly well known to his political entourage.
In recent times, calls for the resignation of Mr. Abad, former president of the LR group in the Assembly appointed minister by Elisabeth Borne and comfortably re-elected on June 19 for a third term as deputy for Ain, have multiplied in the ranks of the opposition and feminist associations.
On June 20, 200 women, elected officials, journalists, feminists, artists, made a request to this effect in a column published by Le Monde.
The day before, the ecologist Sandrine Rousseau had assured that the deputies of Nupes would do “the necessary heckling” to cover his voice in the National Assembly.
06/27/2022 21:44:04 – Paris (AFP) – © 2022 AFP
