French government faces questions over rape claims against minister Damien Abad

TheThe new French government under Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne is under growing pressure after Mediapart revealed that the newly appointed minister for solidarity and the disabled, Damien Abad, has been accused of rape by two women. In its investigation Mediapart also revealed that the allegations had been reported both to the right-wing Les Républicains (LR), in which Abad was until recently a senior figure, and the ruling La République en Marche (LREM) on May 16th.

Senior figures in LREM are now struggling to justify the appointment of Damien Abad to the new government on May 20th. Abad himself strongly denies the allegations.

It was on Saturday evening that Mediapart published the accounts of the two women who accuse Damien Abad of having raped them. The women do not know each other but the alleged events they describe took place a few months apart, at the end of 2010 and the start of 2011.

Margaux, a former centrist political activist aged 35, reported the allegation of rape to the prosecution authorities in 2017. She said that she had met Abad, then a 29-year-old Member of the European Parliament, at a political meeting in 2009 and that he had pestered her for a date for months until she finally agreed to spend an evening with him in Paris in January 2011. After he insisted she drink champagne she had initially consented to sexual relations until she asked him “several times” to stop. She says he failed to do. “He continued … I was stupefied that he could not take any notice of my refusal,” she said.

Margaux first spoke to police in 2012 but felt unable to follow it through at the time and the case was dropped. But she subsequently made a formal complaint of rape in 2017. Initially she hadn't wanted to “do harm” to Damien Abad, she explained. “But at a certain point the harm that I was doing to myself became greater than the need to protect him,” she said. The 2017 investigation was later dropped after police said they did not have enough evidence.

On May 13th 2022, 'Chloé' – not her real name – sent her witness statement to the Observatoire des Violences Sexistes et Sexuelles, a body set up by the #MeToo#Politique collective to highlight sexism and sexual violence in the world of politics. In it she described how one morning in the autumn of 2010 she had awoken in her “underwear” and in a “state of shock” with Damien Abad in a Paris hotel room after having had a drink with him in an adjoining bar the night before. She said she had suffered a “blackout”. The 41-year-old accused the politician of having raped her and said she felt as if she had been “drugged”.

She told Mediapart: “I felt woozy, my body was groggy, stiff and painful, I knew that something had happened that wasn't normal.”

Chloé said that she had drunk only one glass of champagne before blacking out. “That had never happened to me before, especially not after just one glass,” she said. After returning home Chloé said she “cried for hours”. In her report to the Observatoire, Chloé said that she had been “so shocked” that she had taken “several months to realise and admit that what had happened was rape”. She said that it was only after the #MeToo movement and seeing other women speak out that she felt she could get over her own sense of guilt for having met with the MP after the events of that night. On April 27th this year she sent Abad a message in which she stated: “Don't you see what a scandal there would be if a rapist becomes a minister?” She says she has spoken out now because she was “haunted by the idea that there might be other people who have gone through the same thing”.

Cholé's alert was sent to the LREM and LR parties on May 16th 2022 and was then passed on to the prosecution authorities in Paris on May 20th, the day that Abad was appointed as a member of the new government. “It is in the process of being analysed,” the prosecution authorities told 20 Minutes newspaper the following day.

Abad, who has a condition called arthrogryposis which affects all four of his limbs, has strongly denied the allegations,  which he described as “unbelievable and despicable”.

After the first meeting of the new ministerial team on Monday May 23rd, official government spokesperson Olivia Grégoire said that the key issue was to “establish the truth” and that it was “for the justice system to do that and make its decision”. She also told journalists that the government would have “zero tolerance for sexual criminals”.

Prime minister's office “unaware”

When she was asked about the case on Sunday morning, the prime minister Élisabeth Borne had insisted that “obviously” she was “not aware” of the claims beforehand. “I saw the article on Mediapart yesterday, I have no more information other than the fact that the case was dropped.”

The new prime minister's comments raise some questions, however, particularly about her lack of knowledge of a rape allegation from 2017 in which the case was later closed. Before each minister is appointed, their background is examined in detail. How is it possible that the government was unaware that this complaint had been made, when it had even been leaked at the time to the magazine Closer and news of it had been circulating widely in political circles? And how can one explain that the alert made by the Observatoire on May 16th to several key figures within the LREM – to Christophe Castaner, president of the party's group at the National Assembly, to Stanislas Guerini, managing director of the party and now himself a minister, and to LREM MP Bérangère Couillard – was not passed on to either the prime minister's office or the Élysée?

When contacted by Mediapart on Friday May 20th Christophe Castaner insisted that he had not received the alert, though the Observatoire des Violences Sexistes et Sexuelles had sent it to him by email. Following Mediapart's questions he informed the prosecution authorities of the fact. Stanislas Guerini said he had not read his emails at the time and therefore did not discover the alert until Saturday morning, following Mediapart's questions. MP Bérangère Couillard did not reply.

When first approached on Friday the prime minister's office did not respond to Mediapart's questions. On Sunday the prime minister herself said she wanted to be “very clear” concerning the allegations against Damien Abad. “There can be no impunity in any issue of harassment and sexual aggression … I can assure you that if there is new information, if the case is again referred to the justice system, then we will draw all the necessary conclusions from that decision,” said Élisabeth Borne. More broadly she added that there was a need to “continue to take action to ensure that women who are victims of aggression or harassment can freely speak out, and that they are properly received when making a complaint.”

When questioned at lunchtime on Sunday by Mediapart the Élysée made no immediate response. This is an embarrassing case for the government; during the recent presidential election campaign Emmanuel Macron stated that he wanted to make female-male equality the “great cause of my new presidency”.

That slogan had been undermined in his first term by the fact that two ministers were kept in government while accused of rape, current interior minister Gérald Darmanin and former environment minister Nicolas Hulot. Both men strongly deny the allegations. The slogan is also tarnished by the continuing presence in government of justice minister Éric Dupond-Moretti, who as a lawyer was a spokesperson for opponents of the #MeToo movement and has himself made some sexist remarks (see this article by Mediapart's Lénaïg Bredoux).

Darmanin, who is still the subject of a rape allegation, in which the prosecution has called for the case to be dropped, has been kept on as interior minister in Élisabeth Borne's new government. This means that, along with other issues, he is once again in charge of leading the fight against sexism and sexual violence.

Key figures in the ruling party reluctant to get involved

During a visit to Bordeaux in south-west France on Sunday afternoon both Éric Dupond-Moretti and Gérald Darmanin declined to answer questions on the Abad case, saying they had “no comment to make”.

Other figures in the ruling party were careful to keep their distance from the Abad case. LREM MP Gilles Le Gendre told France Info radio that he had only found out about the affair from the media and said that “at this stage I'm neither informed enough nor able to say more”. He explained: “Faced with these kinds of accusations you have to be very careful, first out of complete respect for the word of the potential victims and also, and with the same level of scrupulousness, out of respect for the processes of the authorities who are responsible for finding out about it and dealing with it.”

François Bayrou, the president of the LREM's centrist allies MoDem, also declined to get involved. He told BFMTV that he “knew nothing about this case” and that he had “no information on the issue, either before or after, directly or indirectly”. The matter was for the justice system and its “investigations” he said.

However, the former justice minister was critical of the “times we live in” in which “figures in charge are so often targeted” and attacked what he called a “downward spiral” in the public domain. “I want people to reflect; those who comment, if they have facts, then it's fair enough for them to comment. If they don't have any facts then it becomes unbalanced. And we have no facts, no proof, no indications,” he said, dismissing the testimonies of the two women and the facts they have produced such as SMS messages and the accounts of those they confided in. When questioned further by a journalist on BFMTV, François Bayrou interrupted and said: “If there are facts, there will be investigations. If there are investigations, there will be decisions made by the justice system. I'm not going to up the ante, whether it's well-founded or not.”

Damien Abad denies using “coercion” or  committing an “abuse of power”

Damien Abad himself strongly denied the accusations against him in a written response sent to Mediapart on Saturday (read in full in French here). The 42-year-old MP and minister acknowledged that he might have “sent messages which were sometimes intimate” but he asserted “with force that the sexual relations I have had have always been based on the principle of mutual consent”. He also spoke of his disability, insisting he could not physically have carried out the acts that the two women accuse him of.

He also used this defence in the public statement he issued on Sunday morning in which he denied “any kind of coercion on any woman” and “any abuse of power”. He said: “These accusations relate to acts or actions which are impossible for me because of my handicap … [which] limits my movements. It's not possible at all for me to impose such such a practice or such and such an action. Without the consent and the full and entire participation of the other, nothing is possible.” The two women concerned dispute this argument.

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• The original article in French can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter

The full investigation, in French, can be found here.