The affair of the video sex tape and blackmail at city hall in Saint-Étienne is turning into a national political scandal. Following the latest revelations by Mediapart in the case – which show that the right-wing mayor Gaël Perdriau, and his chief of staff Pierre Gauttieri, directly threatened the city's former centrist deputy mayor Gilles Artigues over a video of him in an hotel room with a gay escort filmed without his knowledge – the judicial investigation has gathered pace.
At 9.30am on Tuesday September 13th five protagonists in the affair, including the mayor and his top aide, were taken into custody at police headquarters in Lyon, as revealed by the regional newspaper for that part of south-east France, Le Progrès. They were questioned as part of a criminal investigation into suspected “aggravated blackmail”.
The assistant mayor in charge of education in the city, Samy Kéfi-Jérôme, the man who filmed Gilles Artigues and the male escort in a Paris hotel room in January 2015, was also among those questioned. A fourth person was Kéfi-Jérôme's former partner Gilles Rossary-Lenglet, who has acknowledged his role in the operation to Mediapart. The mayor's deputy chief of staff was also questioned. All five were released from custody that afternoon.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The current deputy mayor of Saint-Étienne, Jean-Pierre Berger, tried to play down the significance of the move at a press conference on Tuesday morning, claiming the mayor had been questioned “at his request” so that “the truth comes out”. But that statement was untrue. In fact, on Monday afternoon the five people concerned were issued with an urgent summons to come in for questioning the following morning.
The judicial investigation was opened on September 2nd, one week after Mediapart first broke the story. As well as examining allegations of “aggravated blackmail”, the probe is looking at claims of “breach of privacy”, “theft of public property by a person in public service”, “breach of trust” and of “receipt” of the proceeds of these offences. After the initial revelations Gaël Perdriau and Pierre Gauttieri told Mediapart they had no involvement in the blackmail of Gilles Artigues and said they did not even know anything about the operation.
But the different revelations since have undermined this version of events. Contacted on various occasions in recent days Gaël Perdriau and his lawyers Julie Pasternak and Christophe Ingrain have not responded to Mediapart's questions. Samy Kéfi-Jérôme, who at the start had even denied the video existed, has, via his lawyers Sofia Bougrine and Mathias Chichportich, denied “any intent to carry out political blackmail”.
The affair, which began with Mediapart's first investigation on August 26th, gathered momentum on September 12th after we published recordings revealing the threats made by the mayor and his chief of staff against Gilles Artigues.
These recordings were made by Gilles Artigues himself after he decided he could take the blackmail no longer. The deputy mayor, a 57-year-old family man with a long political career, said he had wanted to “do away with himself” to bring a halt to this torment at the hands of his blackmailers.
His plan had been to write a letter to explain his actions to his family, accompanied by a USB key with proof of the blackmail, so that afterwards they would understand what had driven him to the act. But first Gilles Artigues had needed to gather evidence, by recording the threats made against him.
The recordings were made during two meetings, one in November 2017 the other in July 2018, in the office and presence of the mayor of Saint-Étienne Gaël Perdriau from the rightwing Les Républicains party. At the time Gilles Artigues, a former Member of Parliament who was from the centre-right UDI party, was both Perdriau's deputy mayor and his rival in the close-knit politics of the city. These conversations, which contain extraordinary aggression, show the pressure that was put on the deputy mayor – enough to make him suicidal - all for the sake of maintaining local political influence. The mayor apparently wanted to ensure that if his deputy mayor one day left the ruling majority coalition he would not cause him political problems. Gilles Artigues stepped down from his post in May 2022 for “professional reasons”.
In the extracts broadcast by Mediapart (below, in French), the mayor Gaël Perdriau acknowledges to Gilles Artigues that he knows of the video that was filmed in an hotel room in Paris in January 2015. This was some months after their joint victory in the municipal elections of 2014. The mayor indicates that he had received these images – which had been filmed by another councillor from the city - on a “USB key”. The video does not show any sexual relations but does show a naked Gilles Artigues being given an erotic massage.
The mayor of the thirteenth biggest city in France then threatens his deputy that he will reveal the contents of the video via “small circles” of people and “little by little” to besmirch the reputation of the local politician, who is a conservative Catholic and very active in the local church diocese.
If me going to jail brings you down because you're seen as an ageing queer past his prime, I've got no problem with that.
When Gilles Artigues complains that the blackmail has become unbearable, the mayor goes even further in talking about the consequences if the video's contents were put on the internet. “Once it's on social networks it's no longer blackmail. It's an execution,” warns Gaël Perdriau, who is also president of the Saint-Étienne metropolitan authority which has a population of 400,000.
In another exchange Perdriau's chief of staff, Pierre Gauttieri, threatens Gilles Artigues in the presence of the mayor, saying he will spread the video among parents of pupils at the schools which the victim's own children attended. “I don't think your children will get over it,” says the mayor's chief aide, who acknowledges that he was acting at the time unrestrained by either “faith or law” and was behaving “like a criminal”.
On another occasion, when Artigues explains that blackmail is an imprisonable offence, Pierre Gauttieri replies: “If me going to jail brings you down because you're seen as an ageing queer past his prime, I've got no problem with that.”
Contacted by Mediapart neither Gaël Perdriau nor Pierre Gauttieri replied to our questions about the content of the comments made towards Gilles Artigues (see black box below).
However, on Wednesday September 14th Pierre Gauttieri gave an interview to local television station TL7 in which he expressed his “shame” and apologised to “Gilles Artigues' family”, as well as to his own. “I've taken the time to listen again to my comments which were reported by Mediapart. I was overcome with shame,” he said. “They are intolerable, unacceptable. I'd almost say inexcusable.” The 54-year-old put his comments down to a “moment of anger” and insisted he had never intended to cause harm to the deputy mayor's family. However, Gauttieri said he had no plans to resign and insisted that neither he nor the mayor were behind “this operation”.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
The prosecution authorities in Lyon said the five had been questioned in order to “gather the initial declarations of the main protagonists of this affair”. The prosecutors added: “Investigations, consisting in particular of examining the different media and documents seized during searches, are continuing under the authority of the investigating judges who will in due course assess the appropriate next steps for this investigation.”
Along with the legal aspects of the case, the string of revelations has had an impact on Gaël Perdriau's political prospects. The day after Mediapart's initial revelations his party, the rightwing Les Républicains, began moves to expel him as a member. “While in view of the latest revelations it is now down to the legal system to make judgement as to the guilt and degree of involvement of Mr Perdriau, Les Républicains can only condemn the despicable methods used by the mayor of Saint-Étienne,” the party wrote in a statement that referred to “methods not worthy of an elected representative”.
There is currently a leadership contest for the presidency of Les Républicains and all three candidates have expressed their dismay at the revelations. “How can one not feel the deepest of disgust in the face of Mediapart's revelations?” Tweeted the president of the party's group Bruno Retailleau on Monday. Member of Parliament Éric Ciotti launched an attack on Gaël Perdriau as “this holier than thou person who shows the horrific face of the worst kind of ignominy”. The third party candidate, Aurélien Pradié, spoke to Mediapart about the “Mafia-style” and “diabolical and contemptible” methods deployed.
Pradié, who is currently the secretary-general of LR as well as an MP for the Lot département or county in south-west France, also explained that Gaël Perdriau's expulsion from the party will occur in a fortnight “at the next meeting of the policy bureau”. He explained: “We have asked the president of the [party's] federation in the Loire [editor's note, the département or county where Saint-Étienne is located] Jean-Pierre Taite, to call for his expulsion. As Gaël Perdriau is simply a party member that is the procedure to follow. But everyone is agreed, there won't be any debate over it.” MP Éric Ciotti said that the move to expel the mayor of Saint-Étienne had also attracted unanimity because he had been in “open conflict with the elected representatives in his département”.
New legislation at the National Assembly?
In recent days the mayor has defended himself against what he calls a “plot” seeking to “destroy” him politically. On Sur France Bleu local radio he even said he had envisaged standing for the presidency of his party and made a direct link between “recent news events and what is happening”. This defence surprised LR party managers given that Gaël Perdriau has not been paying his membership dues since December 2021, the date at which he was removed as a vice-president of the party by current party boss Christian Jacob. The reason for this was his criticism of the LR's political line.
But anger over what has happened goes well beyond LR ranks. François Bayrou, president of the centrist and government-supporting MoDem party, several of whose councillors belong to Gaël Perdriau's coalition majority in Saint-Étienne, told Mediapart that it was an “abject affair”. The former justice minister and close ally of President Emmanuel Macron said: “This type of Mafia-style plot in a democracy such as ours is intolerable. The direct and immediate consequences should be the resignation of the councillors concerned. And resignation itself is too light: there should be legal proceedings and, to understand where I'm coming from on this, prison sentences.”
On the Left the first secretary of the Socialist Party, Oliver Faure, said he was considering bringing forward a bill at the National Assembly to “criminalise the violation of privacy”. Régis Juanico, the former MP for the leftwing Géneration.s party in the Loire département, said that if Gaël Perdriau did not resign then the government should step in and remove him. “These gangster methods and the rule by terror of the monstrous duo Perdriau-Gauttieri that's been in place for eight years must stop immediately,” he Tweeted.
Facing widespread calls to step down, Gaël Perdriau can no longer even rely on the support of his local political allies. On Monday evening 42 of the 46 councillors in his ruling majority “condemned with the strongest severity the revolting comments made in the latest recordings that have been broadcast” in a brief statement that – astonishingly – made no mention of the mayor himself. The four councillors among the majority who did not sign it were Gilles Artigues and Samy Kéfi-Jérôme – respectively the victim and one of the protagonists in the affair – as well as two councillors from the centrist UDI party who are close to Artigues. One of these, Lionel Boucher, recently attacked what he called “the majority's complicit silence”.
On the Saint-Étienne metropolitan authority, Gaël Perdriau's deputy president Hervé Reynaud said he was “stunned” at the recordings revealed by Mediapart. “We want a frank discussion with our president and Gilles Artigues. It's very hard to work in these circumstances,” Reynaud, who is also mayor of the nearby town of Saint-Chamond and a member of LR, told Le Progrès. His counterpart as mayor in nearby Andrézieux-Bouthéon, François Driol, who is also a vice-president of the metropolitan authority, spoke of his desire for the “legal system to take action” and warned: “We can no longer continue in the executive as if nothing has happened.”
The local opposition has also made its voice heard and called for the mayor to resign as a matter of urgency. “This recording has caused real shockwaves, even more powerful than the first articles, because hearing the voices makes it more concrete,” said Patrick Courbon, an opposition councillor on the city council in Saint-Étienne. “We've said for years that we've been faced with a mafia-style system and no one listened to us, yet here we now are, listening to the chief of staff acknowledging that he uses 'criminal methods',” said the councillor, who said he was still “shocked by the feeling of impunity” that the recording revealed.
“It's hard on Saint-Étienne,” said Olivier Longeon, a city councillor for the green Europe Écologie-Les Verts (EELV) party, who is also “stunned” by the recordings. He said he hoped the legal system would do its work “quickly”. On Friday September 9th he and fellow green opposition members on the council sent a formal letter to Gaël Perdriau demanding his suspension, as well as that of Samy Kéfi-Jérôme and Pierre Gauttieri, “for the period of the judicial investigation … for the well-being and calm of the people of Saint-Étienne as much as for the members of personnel at the city and the metropolitan authority.” It concluded: “We've entered into another dimension with this affair, city hall is going to have to make an enormous effort to be transparent. Nothing can go back to how it was before.”
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English version and editing by Michael Streeter