Following the publication earlier this month of a joint investigation by Mediapart and French public radio station France Inter into allegations of sexual assault and harassment by leading Green politician and MP Denis Baupin, five more women have come forward with accounts of how they were also victims of his lewd behaviour.
Baupin was forced to resign as deputy speaker of the National Assembly, the lower house of the French parliament, after Mediapart revealed on May 9th detailed allegations by eight women, including former colleagues of Baupin’s in the EELV Green party, that they had been groped by him or sent insistent sexually explicit mobile phone text messages.
On May 10th, following the revelations by Mediapart and France Inter, the Paris public prosecutor’s office launched a preliminary investigation into the accusations. Police have now taken statements from several of those cited by Mediapart, including MP Isabelle Attard, the spokeswoman for the EELV party Sandrine Rousseau, the deputy mayor of the town of Le Mans, Elen Debost, and a councillor on the Greater Paris regional council, Annie Lahmer.
Baupin, 53, is the husband of French housing minister Emmanuelle Cosse and was a deputy-mayor of Paris for 11 years until 2012, when he was elected as a member of parliament for a Paris constituency. He has denied the allegations, via his lawyer, and has lodged a lawsuit against Mediapart and France Inter for defamation.
Among the five women who have made contact with Mediapart and France Inter since the revelations were first published on May 9th, two of them agreed to be named in this article while the three others asked for their names to be withheld. All five have said they will readily agree to be questioned by police leading the investigation opened by the public prosecutor’s office.
One of the five is Geneviève Zdrojewski, a retired senior civil servant. In 1995, she was appointed head of the environment ministry’s cabinet bureau, a key post that coordinates relations between the national public administration and the ministry. She kept the post when, in general elections in 1997, the socialists ousted the conservative government and outgoing environment minister Corinne Lepage was replaced by then-Green party leader Dominique Voynet.
Voynet appointed Denis Baupin as advisor to the ministry. “On two occasions, between 1997 and 1998, Denis Baupin physically assaulted me,” said Zdrojewski. “The first time, Mr Baupin entered my office rapidly, in a completely unexpected manner, and threw himself upon me. I began shouting. He said to me ‘stop shouting, your secretary will hear us’. I said ‘But this is unbearable, stop’. I was furious. So he left.
Zdrojewski said she told nobody in the ministry about the events. She was not part of the Green movement and because she had previously served conservative environment minister Corinne Lepage she said she felt in “a delicate political position” under Voynet. In 1999 she left the ministry for a post with the European commission. “I said nothing to Dominique Voynet, nor to the [ministry] cabinet,” she told Mediapart. “I sorted it out on my own by shouting. But I spoke a lot about it with friends, because i was traumatised all the same. It is very humiliating. This situation was very uncomfortable. It was really violent.”
“Afterwards you feel shabby,”added Zdrojewski. “You feel like an object. That lasts a fair while.” She said she decided to talk publicly about the events after reading the accounts published earlier this month. “At the time, it was so sudden that he could not have done that just once, 20 years ago,” she said. “I couldn’t have been the exception. I said to myself that it would be talked about one day or another.”
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Another woman who contacted Mediapart since the May 9th article asked for her name to be withheld and is referred to here as 'X'. In 1999, she was a young official with the Green party (then called Les Verts, since renamed EELV after its merger with the Europe Ecologie party). 'X' recounted an incident with Baupin during a dinner party gathering that year of leaders of the Green party, who met once per week. During the meal, Denis Baupin sat opposite me,” she recalled. “He rubbed his foot against me. He even took his shoe off to reach my crotch.” She said that at the end of the dinner, Baupin asked her to follow him to his office. “He told me ‘you’ve received a fax in my office’. It was in front of everyone. It was just a few months before the European elections in 1999. I was a young militant. I had only been in Paris a few months and I didn’t know anyone.” She followed Baupin to his office. “Having hardly entered his office it was an octopus which jumped on me. He tried to kiss me by every means. I fought back. And, of course, there was no fax.”
She said she escaped from the room “distraught and disheveled”. In the corridor she came across several Green party officials who were still chatting together. One of them was Jean-Claude Biau, then a member of the executive committee of the party, which he would later resign from. “We saw her arrive, upset and a little in tears, saying ‘protect me’”, Biau told Mediapart. “She said she had just been assaulted by Denis Baupin. We accompanied her back to her hotel.”
But Biau and his colleagues did not question her about the events that evening, and never raised the matter with her afterwards. “At the time, to talk about lodging a complaint was not in fashion,” he added.
Baupin’s alleged victim continued to work for the party leadership for several years after the events, before returning to what she called “provincial activism”.
Baupin demands 'off the record' terms for interview
In 2001, Denis Baupin was elected deputy mayor of Paris. One year later, following the defeat of the socialist government in general elections in June 2002, he was involved in finding new posts for Green party officials until then employed at the environment ministry. One of them was Baupin’s former press attaché, Laurence Mermet. “I was offered by Denis Baupin, who was then deputy [Paris] mayor with responsibility for transport issues, the job of head of communications for the road transport and travel department, which came under his responsibility,” she told Mediapart. “I signed a three-year fixed-term working contract but I only stayed in the post until July 2004.”
During that period – Mermet says she cannot recall the precise date – she took part in an internal policy meeting of the Green party. She said she was sitting “comfortably” in a chair when Denis Baupin came to sit just behind her.
“Then he got very close and began caressing my neck with insistence, without any ambiguity as to the range of his gestures, which couldn’t have been more intimate,” she recalled. “Flabbergasted, I firmly made him understand that I wasn’t interested in that with him and I firmly pushed him away. He never again tried anything with me afterwards.”
She does however remember receiving text messages on her mobile phone the contents of which she said were “also unequivocal”. Because she worked under the direct orders of Baupin, she said she felt “shocked” by the hierarchical relationship. “I had no intention of becoming Denis Baupin’s dancer,” she said. “He was someone I used to respect as a militant and political figure. So when it happened, I fell off my chair; I had the impression that we’d just spent the night together. The only difference was that we had a relationship of subordination. I was just an assistant. At the time, this act destabilized me a great deal.”
Mermet thinks now that the incident contributed to her decision several months later to resign from her post, when she left Paris and changed profession. She now lives and works in Brittany, where she remains a member of the Green party.
Another EELV party activist, who asked not to be named, told Mediapart of how Baupin molested her during the 2012 legislative election campaign in Paris. During a press conference organised on April 3rd 2012, at the Théâtre de l’Opprimé, she came across Baupin who was standing for a constituency in the city’s 13th arrondissement. “Denis arrived, he kissed me while placing his left hand on my right breast,” she said. She recalled saying “Are you out of your mind, Denis?”, and that he replied: “It’s to make your partner react.”
The fifth person to come forward with testimony about Baupin’s lewd behaviour, a young radio journalist, also agreed to be interviewed on condition her name is withheld here. She began working for the radio station she is still employed by in December 2014, when she was first given the task of inviting guests on to a programme, and who she also greeted and accompanied when they arrived at the studios. Denis Baupin was one such guest. After the programme he appeared on, she said he sent her a text message on her mobile phone to thank her for the welcome she gave him. “But afterwards, it continued,” she recalled. “They weren’t sexual messages, but of the likes of ‘You’re working until what time?’, ‘Oh, but you work late’.” She notably remembered receiving messages on New Year’s Eve 2014. “Up until 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. on December 31st it never stopped,” she said. “I ended up by saying that I was with my family, that this should not be happening and that I worked for the media. He stopped.”
She told her radio team that she wanted no more contact with Baupin. “For the regional elections, it was a colleague who looked after things,” she said. “I don’t want to greet him or call him anymore.” At the time, she spoke about the harassment with some of her colleagues. Contacted by Mediapart, they confirmed that they had been informed.
Before publication of this article, Mediapart and France Inter contacted Denis Baupin for an interview about the allegations. He initially agreed and, communicating via his lawyer Emmanuel Pierrat, demanded that the interview be recorded and that none of it should be ‘off the record’. An appointment was made for Saturday May 28th. However, when Mediapart’s Lénaïg Bredoux and France Inter journalist Cyril Graziani arrived for the meeting, Emmanuel Pierrat presented new conditions for the interview, notably that part of it should remain off the record. When Bredoux and Graziani refused to accept the conditions, Pierrat cancelled the interview.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse