Thomas Piketty, Aurélie Filippetti and the buried 'domestic violence' case

InIn November last year, renowned French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the internationally best-selling work Capital in the Twenty-First Century, gave a conference in Toulouse, south-west France, at the city’s Capitole University.

The event was organised with the university’s Institute of Political Studies, the IEP, and Piketty was there to discuss his latest book, published in 2019, Capital and Ideology.

Piketty, 48, is economics professor at the Paris School of Economics, which he helped to found, a lecturer with the London School of Economics and the author of a dozen books, regularly contributing articles and essays to mainstream and specialised media, and academic blogging. He is particularly acclaimed among the Left both in France and abroad, notably for his research on the evidence and history of the widening wealth gap worldwide, and suggested measures on reversing it.

But the discussions at the November 21st conference were to abruptly move to ruder matters; Piketty’s private life. This concerned events that happened ten years earlier and which Piketty had never spoken about in a public arena, namely a complaint filed against him by his former partner, Aurélie Filippetti, who was then a socialist Member of Parliament (MP), for domestic violence.

The scene involved a young political sciences student, who raised the issue that had been largely shrouded in silence over the years, both by the will of the two people concerned and also within France's Socialist Party, to which they were both allied, and the media. Mediapart has attempted to establish the facts of the events in question, and the reasons, as seen from various angles presented here, for the taboo surrounding them.

The student and the economist

It was when the time came to take questions from the audience, a student from the political studies school school, Juliette (her last name is withheld on her request), a feminist militant, took the microphone to ask Piketty: “You have recognised in 2009 to having beaten your former partner, and so I wanted to know what you thought about, doing this conference, when in three days, on November 23rd, there will be a march against violence towards women.”

As murmuring could be heard across the auditorium, Piketty briefly interrupted the young woman, who continued: “So I wanted to know, regarding the organisers, if you don’t find it a little indecent to invite someone…”

Piketty shot back: “I’m going to answer you, and I will tell you why it is your contribution that is indecent.” The economist suggested Juliette should “sit the entrance exam for the police or the magistracy to carry out investigations” before saying: “Specifically, you are talking about a case that was closed without further action.”

Video of the sequence was relayed in a number of posts on Twiter, as these below:

Piketty, who had not mentioned that he was issued with a “reminder of the law” (a legal move that amounts to a warning) over the incident in question, then for the first time publicly accused his former partner of violent behaviour of her own, but without ever mentioning the name of Aurélie Filippetti. “The relationship you are talking about was a relationship with a person who was extremely violent towards my daughters,” he said, before adding: “I put her out of my home. I pushed her outside, which I regret, but I can assure you that given the behaviour towards my daughters I think that a lot of people would be much more het up than that. I regret having pushed her out of my home, she fell just in the half-open door, which did not prevent her from going to work the next day, or the following one. I nevertheless regret it.”

Addressing Juliette, he said: You are right to be concerned about these matters, and I am also just as much as you […] If you think that the investigations were badly managed, go and sit the entrance exam for the police, the magistracy, and carry out better investigations.”

Juliette attempted to win back the microphone in vain. Some of the audience applauded, while others booed, amid an atmosphere of palpable unease. “Carry out a bit of introspection,” said the conference chairman, Sciences Po lecturer Éric Darras, addressing Juliette. “Think a bit about what you’re doing. It’s you who is indecent, all the same.”

Contacted since by Mediapart, Darras explained: “My comment didn’t concern her question, but her follow-up to the response, strongly affected but also particularly long and precise, from our guest Thomas Piketty. After that emotional response, it didn’t seem opportune to me to insist further.”

Meanwhile, the Sciences Po Toulouse school has still not made the recording of the conference public again since it disappeared from its dedicated YouTube page and did not reply to questions submitted to it on the subject.

Interviewed, Juliette explained that, “I learnt two years ago about what happened in 2009 and I found it extremely serious that no-one was aware”.

“It seemed very problematic to me not to do anything,” she said, despite the fact that the case ended in an agreement between the two parties and was closed without further action, and that Filippetti had made little reference herself to the events in public. Juliette said she was later tackled about her move at the conference by fellow students. “They considered that I had prevented free speech, that I had humiliated Piketty, and that I had done a disservice to the [feminist] struggle. I hadn’t expected it to be as hard.”

The complaint filed for defamation

Reacting to Piketty’s allegation of Aurélie Filippetti’s violence towards his daughters, her lawyer, Vincent Toledano, said that a writ for defamation (a civil suit that is expected to be a faster procedure than a procedure under criminal law) had been served against the economist on December 4th 2019, in which Fillipetti is asking for 15,000 euros in damages and interest, and the publication of the eventual ruling in three media of her choice.

Filippetti told Mediapart that she had not seen the video recording of the conference, but was told of what was said. “I couldn’t listen,” Filippetti, 46, told Mediapart. “It is someone who, physically, I can’t listen to talking of that.” The former culture minister said she was “extremely taken aback and shocked” by what Piketty said. “All this is very violent for me.”

She said that the writ for defamation was served because “one cannot say any old thing when one has been recognised as the perpetrator of domestic violence […] one doesn’t re-inflict a new form of violence upon the person who has been the victim”. 

Piketty’s lawyer, Benoît Huet rejected the argument. “Thomas Piketty sticks to what he said, it was not defamatory and is based on factual elements that he and his entourage will be able to set out in court,” he commented. “It is preferable that these debates take place in a court and not in a media tribunal.”

In a written response to Mediapart, Piketty said he and Filippetti had been in a “pathological relationship, and toxic for the two parties”, which, he added, he “once more regrets not having known how to immediately halt and in a calm manner”. He referred to the state of health of Filippetti at the period of the events: “The plaintiff was at the time in a state of strong aggressiveness towards my daughters and towards herself. In this complex, and what was for me unknown, context I did not always know how to react to this situation with as much distance as I would have liked to. I regret that very profoundly, and I apologise for that.” 

Piketty submitted to Mediapart a document, provided by his wife, the French economist Julia Cagé, in which he recounts his vision of the relationship he had with Filippetti, and which his lawyer said corresponded with what he told the police when he was questioned in 2009. In it, he refers to the presence of violence, including his slapping of Filippetti, who was at the time a socialist Member of Parliament for a constituency in the Lorraine region of north-east France and spokeswoman for the socialist group in parliament. He describes a relationship marked by verbal, psychological and sometimes physical violence – notably, he alleges, on the part of Filippetti.

Questioned about this description, Filippetti said: “It’s a typical technique for dirtying the person who is a victim. And I don’t allow him to try and dirty me today. There is an enormous jump between a relationship that doesn’t work and physical violence. That is, all the same, the great contribution of “MeToo”. There are physical acts carried out that are intolerable.”

The judicial procedure in 2009

“He can say what he likes now, but at the time he didn’t file a complaint,” said Filippetti. “The facts that were, at that moment, laid on the table were validated by the judicial authorities.”

In documents consulted by Mediapart, the judicial and legal conclusions of the case for “conjugal violence”, in the plural (“violences conjugales”), never mention the mutual violence described by Piketty. When Filippetti filed a formal complaint on February 6th 2009, addressed in writing to the public prosecution services, she detailed “repeated violence” between February 2008 and February 2009. A preliminary investigation into the accusations was immediately launched by the prosecution services.

But, soon after, a mediation process began between the two parties, which was made known to the prosecution services. It was organised by lawyer Jean-Pierre Mignard, a socialist known to both Piketty and Filippetti. “I carried out this job of jurist,” recalled Mignard. “With their respective lawyers we managed to calm the situation. At the time, we were facing two people who seemed as if engaged over human rights. Their confrontation would have hurt everyone.”

A protocol agreement between the two (see below) was signed. According to a copy shown to Mediapart, it set out that Filippetti would withdraw her complaint in exchange for Piketty recognising his guilt in committing violence towards her.

The correspondence surrounding the agreement was to remain confidential, unless there had been “prior concertation” to the contrary. Filippetti’s lawyer at the time, Jean-Étienne Giamarchi, has contacted Piketty’s lawyer to inform him of this and that she now no longer feels bound by the terms. “The idea at the time was to bury the case, except if there was prior concertation,” he told Mediapart. “But [Piketty] has broken the pact. Whereas ten years ago the two considered that the page should be turned, it is him who today re-opens the book.”

Mediapart obtained access to two letters, both dated June 23rd 2009, which were exchanged as part of the agreement. In that signed by Piketty and addressed to Filippetti, he wrote: “I would like to express my profound regrets for having lost my calm on several occasions during our relationship and to have made you suffer violence, and I apologise for that.”

In her response, Filippetti wrote: “I take note of your regrets and excuses that you have expressed in your letter of today. To take them into account, I withdraw my complaint for conjugal violence.” 

Both Filippetti and Piketty agreed in writing that the case should not be mentioned in public, and the two letters are placed under the safekeeping of Jean-Pierre Mignard, states the agreement, “until the prosecution services have established a written reminder of the law” – which amounts to a warning. Under French law, it is in the power of a public prosecutor, in circumstances they believe are justified, to thus end any further prosecution of a case under the condition that there is no repeat offending.  

That “reminder of the law” was served on Piketty three months later, bringing a close to the prosecution services’ investigation. Mediapart has obtained access to the formal letter addressed to Piketty by chief Paris public prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin, dated September 16th 2009 (see below). “Taking into account the circumstances, I have decided to not carry out, in the immediate future, proceedings against you,” the letter reads. “Nevertheless, this decision is revocable at any time, notably in the case that you will again be placed in question in another procedure. It constitutes a warning to you.”

On Piketty’s part, no complaint or any other legal procedure had been engaged against Filippetti. Meanwhile, the economist has never since been the subject of accusations of wrongdoing in his behaviour with women.

“I chose to place my confidence in the police and the justice system and to not bring this case into the public arena in order to protect those close to me and the plaintiff,” Piketty told Mediapart. “I maintain that choice.”

For most of the French media, the case was a 'private' matter

But the events had already been divulged to the press. On March 3rd 2009, daily newspaper Le Figaro published a brief report amounting to three-sentences in its ‘Confidential’ section, and which began: “Nothing is going right anymore between Aurélie Filippetti, the MP close to Ségolène Royal, and Thomas Piketty, one of the economists the most listened-to by the PS [Socialist Party].” Ségolène Royal was the socialist presidential candidate in elections in 2007, when Piketty served as an economic advisor to her, and after her defeat by Nicolas Sarkozy she led her own faction within the party with the ambition of standing again (she eventually lost primary elections in 2011 to her former partner François Hollande). 

Filippetti says today: “The report completely destabilised me. I hesitated over filing a complaint because I told myself it ran the risk of being politically manipulated. Here, it was in Le Figaro, it was just a high-noon settling of scores in Ségolène’s team. At our expense, to us two. Something which had to be demonstrated.”

Shortly after Le Figaro published the story, French press agency AFP sent out a report in which Thomas Piketty was quoted as dismissing “gutter stories” (questioned, the economist said this was a misquote, and that he had said “to cover this private story is gutter journalism”) and Aurélie Filippetti was quoted as saying, “It’s a private matter”.

Online news magazine Arrêt sur images, which notably dissects and analyses media stories,  published an article questioning whether the reporting of Filippetti’s complaint was a private matter or worthy of public attention. That was followed by an editorial by the site’s founder and editor Daniel Schneidermann, in which he judged the events to be a purely private affair.

“If I remember well of what we knew at the time, the criteria of public interest, which directs our choices, did not appear obvious,” Schneidermann told Mediapart. “Today, if the story broke with the same elements, I think I would tell myself the same thing.” 

Indeed, Arrêt sur images did not cover the story of how student Juliette tackled Piketty at the Toulouse conference last November, nor did the vast majority of the French media, with the exception of regional daily La Dépêche, which covers Toulouse, and cultural and political affairs magazine Les Inrockuptibles, and brief reports in gossip magazines.

“On the other hand, the complaint for defamation filed by Aurélie Filippetti changes the situation, the case enters the public domain,” continued Schneidermann. “But then, in the context of current news events, it is not a priority from my point of view.” 

French daily Le Monde also chose not to report the story, neither when it broke ten years ago nor now following the conference in Toulouse. But two of the daily’s investigative journalists, Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme, referred to the events in a passage from their 2011 book Sarko m’a tuer, for which they interviewed numerous people who recounted how they had been victims of wrath and reprisals from former president Nicolas Sarkozy and his allies.

The passage recounts how, in 2009 when Sarkozy was two years into his five-year presidency, they had been contacted by a “trustworthy” person (who they didn’t name) who they described as a member of Sarkozy’s then UMP party, who was “close to the presidential office and the police”. The passage continues:

“‘Look, I’ve got something that’s going to really bug Ségolène [Royal],’ said the man, jovial. On the table was a summary of a complaint for violence filed by the MP Aurélie Filippetti […] against her former partner […]. It was the type of document that normally doesn’t do the rounds. Unless there was a desire to destabilise the two privileged targets. At Le Monde, there is information that one is honoured not to publish.”

The only reference the daily ever made to the events was in a lengthy portrait of Piketty by Pierre Jaxel-Truer published in June 2014,  when the journalist alluded to “a brief and stormy liaison” the economist had with Filippetti, which was described as “an affair that ended badly and which contributed to the PS [Socialist Party] closing its doors on him”. 

Today, Piketty says that this was the only time he had been directly contacted by a French journalist about the case. “He informed me that he would be mentioning the case in his portrait, which he did.”

A broad silence within the French Socialist Party

At France’s Socialist Party (Parti socialiste), no-one today says they can recall that in 2009 the Filippetti-Piketty case was the subject of discussions among its leadership. However, everyone, of course, was aware of the events; Filippetti was an MP close to Ségolène Royal, while Piketty was already a well-known economist who had served as an advisor to her 2007 presidential election campaign.

“At the time, it wasn’t a media event, nor a political event,” said Benoît Hamon, a former minister and Socialist Party candidate in the 2017 presidential election, and who in 2009 was the party’s spokesman. He cannot recall being questioned by a journalist about the matter during a press briefing. He said that within the party “the idea was that it is a private matter, which had no political flesh”. That was despite the fact that the Filippetti’s accusations concerned behaviour that could be regarded as a criminal matter.   

For lawyer Jean-Pierre Mignard, who was involved in socialist candidate Ségolène Royal’s 2007 presidential election campaign, a long-serving socialist activist who joined Emmanuel Macron’s movement in 2016, the case was regarded as being within “the wide limits of private life”, adding: “And that’s certainly what has changed today.”

Former Socialist Party press officer Dominique Bouissou, who in 2009 was a member, like Filippetti, of Royal’s faction within the party – which Piketty was allied to – recalled that “the person who left the game was Piketty, he was placed at a distance”. 

“We had talked about it among ourselves,” recalled Delphine Batho, then a socialist MP (she was later environment minister under the presidency of François Hollande, but was sacked after one year over her public disagreement on government policy ), and who now sits in parliament as an independent. “We decided to respect the will of Aurélie [editor’s note: to not speak in public about the matter] and to stick within the framework of the procedures she followed. But after that, Piketty was no longer engaged in Ségolène Royal’s team […] Some of us drew personal [conclusions] about the personality of Thomas Piketty.”

Questioned by Mediapart, Ségolène Royal said she had “at a personal level supported” Filippetti, who she said she visited “very discreetly”. Royal added that she did not become involved in the heart of the case and could not recall any discussions on the subject within her team.

Piketty said he had never felt distanced in any way by the socialists. “I briefly took part in the 2007 campaign, but I was never a member of the PS [Socialist Party] nor Ségolène Royal’s entourage.”

After 2009 Filippetti and Piketty led quite different career paths and did not find themselves in the same environment until 2017, when they both took part in socialist candidate Benoît Hamon’s presidential election campaign. “Aurélie asked not to find herself at the same event, or the same [meeting attendance] bill as him,” recalled Hamon.

For her part, Philippetti said of the campaign: “I kept myself at a distance, I didn’t go to the same meetings where he was.”

Where they did find themselves under the same roof was at a public meeting in March 2017 at the Bercy AccordHotel Arena in Paris, when Hamon was attempting to kickstart his campaign (he would later be eliminated in the first round of voting in April, when he arrived in sixth place). “We naturally did things so that they weren’t sitting side by side,” recalled Alexandre Tiphagne, a member of Hamon’s campaign team and who had long served as a member of Filippetti’s staff.

Apart from allusions to the case – often distorted or incomplete – in media portraits of Piketty (such as here in French business magazine Challenges), it was only mentioned in detail before the November conference in Toulouse on two occasions. The first of these was in the book Sarko m’a tuer, when it was given as an illustration of how the Sarkozy entourage allegedly targeted Filippetti, and the second was in the British press shortly after the publication in English of Piketty’s best-selling work Capital in the Twenty-First Century (first published in France in 2013 as Le Capital au XXI^e siècle).

This was an article in the rightwing daily tabloid The Daily Mail, published on May 3rd 2014 under the headline: “The Left’s ‘rock star economist? Thomas Piketty is a woman beater, says former lover”. In the report, The Daily Mail (which published another scathing article on Piketty three weeks later, this time borrowing from a Financial Times report which challenged the accuracy of the contents of his book) detailed how Filippetti had filed her complaint on February 6th 2009, and quoted an un-named person it described as “A Socialist Party source, who was close to the couple” who suggested that the events represented “one of the darkest periods of her life”. It also cited Piketty, who confirmed that he had been questioned in police custody but who “disputed the allegations”, telling the tabloid: “The case closed five years ago. There was no factual or legal basis to pursue it.”

The story appeared, almost identical, the following day in the conservative British daily The Telegraph, and six days later the francophone Canadian daily La Presse picked up the Daily Mail story in an analysis piece about the consequences of such coverage, while underlining the “openly rightwing” press interest in attacking a leftwing economist.

“I never wanted to bring this matter into the public arena,” Piketty told Mediapart. No legal action was taken over the reports, although Piketty’s wife Julia Cagé told Mediapart: “We saw a lawyer but we didn’t do anything.”

Mediapart has been told that three years earlier, in 2011, following the publication of Sarko m’a tuer, Piketty asked French publisher Stock to remove his name in any further print run, in the interests of protecting his private life and his family. The authors, Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme were informed of the signing of a protocol with the publisher, by which Piketty’s name would be replaced by “former partner”. That however did not affect online access to the passages concerned.

Contacted by Mediapart, Stock said it was unable to reply to questions on the matter.

Beyond these few examples of media coverage, there was no renewed interest in the case despite the professional ascension of Filippetti, who became culture minister between 2012 and 2014, and that of Piketty, who consolidated his situation as an acclaimed economist of reference for the Left. Despite also heightened concern over domestic violence, as illustrated by major public marches in 2018 and 2019, and a lengthy French government consultation on how to better tackle the problem.

“No-one ever asked me questions,” said Filippetti. “I walled myself in silence […] At the time, I was an MP. I didn’t want my personal life to be talked about. A question haunted me – people would ask me why I stayed for so long [with Piketty]. I was ashamed, I had a feeling of guilt.” She said that it was possible today to talk about the events because she is “far from politics”.

The incident at the November 2019 conference in Toulouse was the first time that Piketty had been questioned on subject. “I was surprised and emotive,” he said of the questions asked by Juliette. “I had prepared nothing.” Asked why he had never anticipated being questioned over the complaint filed by Filippetti, he replied: “I support the MeeToo movement, which is profoundly necessary. In 98% of cases, violence is masculine. The fact that the case concerning me is more complex changes nothing regarding this general reality. I understand the emotion raised by these questions, and I share it.”

The 'machismo' amid the French Socialist Party

For many in the media and politics, the issue of domestic violence, perhaps more so than sexual violence, is regarded as belonging to private life. That fact and the closing of the public prosecution services’ investigation probably contributed significantly to the case being largely ignored.

But other reasons contributed to the silence; in the French Socialist Party in 2009, elected representatives who had been convicted of domestic or sexual violence faced no consequences within the party. In May 2011, when then managing director of the International Monetary fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a party veteran, former minister and until then tipped to be the socialist candidate in France’s presidential elections in 2012, was arrested in New York on sexual assault charges, there were many in the party who eagerly defended his cause. Yet previous allegations of his sexual misconduct had been made known to the party’s leadership.  

“At the time, I had the impression that, in any case, it served no purpose to talk about the matter,” said Filippetti. “And when there was the DSK affair, given the reactions, the demonstration [of that] was made. It was the proof that in any case, what women had to say was not heard, not considered.”

For Delphine Batho, “It’s revealing of the climate of relativization that reigned [in the party], according to which a sexist joke is nothing serious and a man who could be violent should be understood”. Batho, who left the Socialist Party in May 2018 in a further bitter policy dispute, when she joined a Green movement, said a “latent machismo” hung over it, citing allegations of sexual abuse in the young socialist movement, the MJS, and sexual assaults by members of Benoît Hamon’s 2017 presidential election campaign staff.

"Everyone thinks that I'm mad"

“Aurélie was always a [source] of fantasies,” said a male former member of Filippetti’s staff. “She was made out to be an unstable girl, who has problems with guys.”

All those Mediapart questioned for this report agreed that the silence kept about Filippetti’s complaint against Piketty is in part due to the image perceived of her, one of a difficult, fragile, uncontainable character – even, for some, a mad one.

Another reason cited is the reputation that sticks to a woman in the public eye who has a succession of partners. Added to this, Filippetti is also an author who has written two novels which touch, more or less explicitly, upon her love life (Un homme dans la poche, in 2006, and Les Idéaux in 2018). “I always get the impression that in the Middle Ages I would have been burned, like the witches,” she said when questioned about this. “I have never been married, I have had love affairs, and nice love affairs. I have the life of a woman of my times. I should not even justify myself.”

“There are times when one has reason to be annoyed,” she added, talking of her character. “There are things that politically make me indignant. That is a part of me, of my story […] A man has ‘character’, a woman of course has a ‘bad character’.”

French journalist Cécile Amar knows Filippetti well. For Amar, her working-class background set her apart from many around her in politics who, she said, “made her pay for it”. Amar recalled a comment by Filippetti when the two met following a sexual harassment scandal in May 2016 that cost Denis Baupin, the speaker of the lower house, the National Assembly, his job. “After the Baupin affair, I went to see her to talk about sexism in politics,” Amar said. “She said to me, ‘I was wrong to file a complaint. Since then, nobody believes me and everyone thinks that I’m mad’.”

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• This is a lightly abridged version of the original report in French which can be found here.