Nicolas Hulot’s lawyer denounces a “lynching” and a “destruction operation” – The HuffPost

Benoit Tessier via Reuters

NICOLAS HULOT – The defense operation continues in Camp Hulot. The day after the announcement of theopening of a preliminary investigation after the charges of sexual assault and rape versus Nicolas hulot, one of the lawyers of the environmental activist and ex-minister Jacqueline Laffont denounced this Saturday, November 27 the “lynching” suffered by her client.

“Do we have the right to destroy a man in public, to deliver him to this lynching, when the law forbids judging her? And why is it that the law forbids him to be judged? Because all this goes back 30 years, because the truth of yesterday is not the truth of today ”, underlines Jacqueline Laffont, who still denounces a“ operation of destruction ”.

Nicolas Hulot is accused by at least six women, one of whom was a minor at the time of the facts, of sexual assault or rape. Three testified on the show Correspondent broadcast Thursday, two with their faces uncovered. Two other women, the former host Maureen Dor and a former TF1 employee, also transmitted to Correspondent written testimonies on facts of which they accuse Nicolas the former host ofUshuaia.

The facts are prescribed

The televised investigation also includes the testimony of environmental activist Claire Nouvian, who accuses in The world Hulot to place himself as a victim, and returns to the rape complaint filed in 2008 by Pascale Mitterrand, granddaughter of former President François Mitterrand, whose revelation caused a stir in early 2018 when the publication ofa survey in the magazine Ebdo before being closed without follow-up.

But as Jacqueline Laffont points out, the facts are time-barred. This is why the words of the Minister responsible for equality between women and men Élisabeth Moreno, who called on women to speak to justice, “Prescription or not prescription”, indignant the lawyer. The latter considers “dramatic” and “inappropriate” the minister’s remarks. “The prescription is the law, deadlines have been set. Was it Nicolas Hulot who chose the deadline? no ”, she emphasizes. As an echo to the words of the journalist Élise Lucet, presenter of the show, who also affirmed on the set of BFMTV that there is “no journalistic prescription”.

The day before the report was broadcast, the former Minister of State in the government of Édouard Philippe (2017-2018) formally denied on BFMTV these accusations of sexual assault and announced that he was leaving public life “definitively”, to protect his relatives and his Foundation from the fallout of what he also called a “lynching”.

See also on The HuffPost: Nicolas Hulot attacked by a group of feminists during a conference in Tours