The affair involving the French government's budget and public accounts minister, Gérald Darmanin, is not one of morality, but of alleged corruption. Two women have lodged formal complaints against the minister, both of them accusing him of abusing his position as an elected representative to obtain sexual favours from them. They claim that he promised to intervene on their behalf, in the first case over a criminal conviction, in the case case over a housing request.
An investigation to the first complaint, over alleged rape, from a woman called Sophie Spatz-Patterson, was dropped on February 16th this year. Investigators were unable to establish “the absence of the complainant's consent”. She is now considering taking action in her own name to get the case reopened by an investigating magistrate. Darmanin strongly denies any wrongdoing in the case.
The second case involves a complaint from 'Sarah' (not her real name) for “abuse of weakness”, an allegation which triggered a preliminary investigation that is still ongoing. The events of this case are not timed out by statute of limitations rules and this complaint could potentially prove more troubling for the minister.
Darmanin, who has still not been questioned by investigators, states that he has “never abused any woman” nor abused “my power” (see his full response below). He repeated his comments on Tuesday 27 February when speaking to RTL radio. He then paraphrased a comment made by the late President Georges Pompidou in 1972: “I have detected on the part of two or three [people] the ugly quivering of nostrils scenting foul odours and taking great delight in the smell of the sewers.” The minister said he was getting ready to make a formal complaint for “slander”.
The minister has been cautious about responding to questions on the second complaint and the woman who accuses him. But he has not denied sexual relations with her nor having written letters to help her obtain housing.
At the time of the events the minister was mayor of the town of Tourcoing in northern France as well as vice-president of the Hauts-de-France region. He supported Sarah's application for social housing by sending eight letters to the heads of social housing associations, four on February 25th, 2016 and four more to the same landlords on June 21st, 2017. By this time Darmanin, previously a member of the conservative Les Républicains, had joined the government of President Emmanuel Macron as budget minister. He asked the recipients of his letters on Sarah's behalf to “examine her request with goodwill”. Ultimately the letters were to no avail.
But the complainant insists that Darmanin led her to believe that he had the power to help her situation. “He left me confused,” she told Mediapart. “Why didn't he say to me from the start: 'I can't do anything for you myself, I'll send you to such and such a service and you can show them your file'? That's what gave me some hope.” Darmanin did not just write twice to landlords about Sarah's case. He also kept her informed of his actions at each step of the way, including, according to documents seen by Mediapart, on May 24th, 2017, a week after he was nominated as a government minister.
The saga dates back to September 2015 when Sarah says she went to the town hall in Tourcoing and asked if she could talk to the mayor, Gérald Darmanin, about her request to be re-housed. After an initial interview at the mayor's office, a few months later, in February 2016, he came to her flat to discuss her case. “He told me he was single, and also said that he would deal with my housing case,” Sarah told Mediapart. “He took my hand and he put it on his genital area. I understood what he wanted. I unbuttoned his trousers and I gave him fellatio but not to completion.” Sarah says the same thing occurred a few minutes later, after Darmanin had asked for a glass of water.
Sarah, who was also looking for work at the time, said the mayor did not “force” her in any way nor ask her for sex, though he had dropped his trousers and pants. “I told myself that this is what he was expecting in exchange for his help for the housing and employment,” she said. “I did it for my housing application and for [help in getting] a job.” She said later she felt “disgusted” and had not wanted to do it of her own volition. “I wanted to please him so that he dealt with my case … it was the first time that I had sex in return for something. I'd never sold my body before.”
A few minutes later she was “shocked” to get a text message from Gérald Darmanin. “He told me that what I did wasn't right. He wrote to me: 'I don't want to and can't make love with you.' I told myself I'd made a mistake and I sent him back a text apologising and told him that I thought him a 'pussycat'.” Subsequent letters seen by Mediapart show that Darmanin did indeed write letters to four social landlords, days after the encounter in her flat, asking them to treat Sarah's request “kindly”.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In his response to Mediapart via his lawyers Gérald Darmanin stated that he had “never been on a housing allocation committee” and that he had “solicited this body for hundreds of taxpayers as is the case for all elected representatives”. However, a potential difficulty for the minister is that according to the complainant's timetable of events – not so far denied by Darmanin – he sent his first letters on her behalf just days after the sexual activity with her in her flat in February 2016.
The question now arises as to the legal focus of the investigation into the allegations. The concept of “sexual corruption” does not figure in any official legal text. And the notion of “abuse of power” is restricted to French administrative law. However, France's criminal code does contain the offences of “abuse of weakness” and “influence peddling”.
Without commenting on the facts of the current case, Didier Rebut, a professor of criminal law at Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas university, believes that in strictly legal terms there would be no “judicial obstacle” to applying these two articles of the criminal code to this case. “It could only come up against an issue on the facts, which the investigation should determine,” he told Mediapart.
The definition of “abuse of weakness” is a restrictive one. Under Article 223-15-2 of the criminal code the offence must involve “vulnerability” linked to age, an illness, an infirmity, physical or mental impairment or pregnancy. “Originally, abuse of weakness was created to supplement [the crime of] fraud, with criteria that were essentially physical and not social or economic such as economic dependence or social subordination for example,” says Didier Rebut. However, at the beginning of the 2000s the definition was broadened to “psychological or physical subjection”. Professor Rebut says: “This notion was added initially to apply it to sect-related phenomena. It concerns situations where there is someone with the upper hand: a person loses their judgement, their free will, they are totally subject to someone psychologically.” In such cases judges can call for a medical opinion.
A case of 'sexual corruption' in France in 2007
The judicial authorities could also decide to investigate this case under the heading of “influence peddling”. This is defined by Article 432-11 of the criminal code as “the fact, by anyone, of seeking or agreeing to, at any time, directly or indirectly, offers, promises, gifts, presents or any benefits whatsoever, for themselves or for others, to abuse or to cause to be abused their real or supposed influence with the aim of obtaining from a [public] authority or a public administration honours, jobs, business or any other favourable decision”.
Didier Rebut says: “Sexual favours could be included under 'any benefits whatsoever' which involves non-material benefits.” He continues: “All the more so given that to meet the requirements of influence peddling an elected representative does not have to be in a situation where they can really obtain the thing. It's influence, a power that's real or presumed. Behind it there need to be steps taken.” In theory that could be so in this case, as Gérald Darmanin did send letters to social landlords.
“Nothing stops the judges from applying the text to such a situation. So far they have rarely done so, perhaps because of an ongoing tradition or indeed because they have had no – or few – reports of facts of this nature made to them,” says Professor Rebut, who says there are sufficient offences within existing legislation to cover facts that might amount to “sexual corruption”.
If this case were to produce evidence of “influence peddling” then according to Didier Rebut the complainant herself could be at risk. “Like corruption, influence peddling has two sides to it, passive and active,” he says. The first involves the person who is in a position to exercise influence, the second involves the person who is in a position to pay for the exercise of that influence. “If the justice system decided to determine there was passive influence peddling involving Gérald Darmanin, it could also determine active influence peddling for the person who, in the end, agreed to hand over remuneration (including in sexual form) so that he exercised his influence,” he says.
Other people questioned by Mediapart had a different view of this interpretation, however, particularly given the situation of the complainant, who says she was in a vulnerable position. “I don't see how in this case she could be declared to be a co-author of events,” says a lawyer who is not involved in the case.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
In France court cases based on the idea of “sexual corruption” are rare but they do exist. One case that occurred a decade ago provides an example. In 2006 the vice-president of the Loire départment or county council in central eastern France and president of a public social housing group, Georges Bernes, was given a two-year suspended prison sentence and a 10,000-euro fine by the court of appeal in Lyon. Bernes, a member of the conservative UMP party (now Les Républicains), was convicted of having taken advantage of the vulnerability of two young women to obtain sexual favours in return for getting them housing.
In its verdict the court considered that the council politician had “used his functions ...for the sole end of gratifying …. his sexual desires with young vulnerable women” and “showed himself totally unworthy of his functions on which he has cast discredit”.
The court likewise noted that Berne had “multiplied the number of solicitations to them” and had shown them “all the advantages that they could draw from their indulgence” towards him. An aggregating factor in the case was that the senior councillor had used an intermediary to overcome the “remaining reticence” of the two women.
The two women obtained their housing, and one of them also benefited from an intervention by Berne to prolong their right to stay in France. During the investigation, and even more explicitly at trial, they women stated they had “had to accept sexual relations with the accused in exchange for help that he had agreed to provide for them”. For the court it did not matter that in the end the two women could have received the “favourable decisions from which they benefited” without the councillor's help; the councillor had “abused” his “real or supposed influence with the aim of obtaining those decisions”, said the court, whose ruling was confirmed by France's top appeal court the Cour de Cassation in 2007.
More recently a court case took place in the Aveyron département in central southern France in which sexual favours were also at the heart of alleged “influence peddling”. The trial in the town of Rodez last December heard that a 37-year-old artisan, the son of a local mayor, had demanded sexual favours in return for the awarding of public contracts.
“Your company needs to work and I need to fuck,” wrote the defendant in a crude private Facebook message to the complainant, an employee in the building company run by her husband's family. He made his proposition even more explicit: “I'm horny and I really want you. Are you ready to sacrifice yourself so that your man gets public contracts in the Réquistanais [editor's note, an area in Aveyron]?”. The mayor's son who was, according to his lawyer, “out of work and very alone”, then ended his proposition with a final message: “I have the means to deprive your company of public contracts.”
The prosecution in the case called for a two-month suspended prison sentence. But the accused was acquitted on January 17th this year after his lawyer was able to show the court that the woman who received his messages knew that the man had no influence in the awarding of the public contracts in question. “His father was a councillor in another [council area] and so the complainant thus knew that my client did not have the real or supposed influence characteristic of influence peddling,” the man's lawyer told Mediapart.
The final issue in the Gérald Darmanin case is the question of statute of limitations and whether the alleged events are outside the legally prescribed period. This is six years for both abuse of weakness and influence peddling. In the case involving Sophie Spatz-Patterson the alleged events occurred in 2009, and are thus outside the six-year prescription period. However, in relation to Sarah's allegations the events are within the period. The investigators already have a number of material items supplied by the complainant, including telephone calls, text messages, letters, bills and so on. They must now establish whether there was a clear link between Darmanin's intervention in her housing case and the sexual relations that she has described.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter