PPDA targeted by new charges, one allegedly out of time – The HuffPost

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Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, pictured here at the Cannes film festival in 2019, is accused by three new women of sexual violence. One of the stories tells of a rape that is not prescribed.

SEXUAL VIOLENCE – These are in addition to the 23 women already heard by the courts. This Wednesday, December 15, the newspaper Release once again made its front page Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, revealing the testimonies of three women who claim to be victims sexual violence from the former star of the TF1 newscast.

These three new accounts come from women who were not heard during the preliminary investigation that was closed at the end of June. They report sexual assault and even rape. Especially, while the journalist has so far always benefited from the prescription, one of the cases reported by Release seems to be able to escape it.

The first two testimonials had already been mentioned in the press these last weeks. It is first of all a receptionist at a hotel in Valmorel, in Savoie, who recounts being forcibly kissed in an elevator where she was with PPDA.

Two testimonies with their face uncovered

The second story is made by Laure Eude, who was studying to become a press secretary in 1985 when at the Cannes Film Festival, the journalist would have blocked her in her room before raping her, without a condom. “The scene lasted three minutes. He hadn’t even said hello to me. I had the feeling that I had followed the wolf and that the wolf had eaten me ”, she reports today to Release. Despite his immediate testimony and the many people informed (in the organization of the festival, in his school, his parents), no legal action will be taken at the time.

For these two cases, at the end of the year, complaints were filed in Liévin and Amiens, respectively for sexual assault and rape.

The third affair is told openly by Amandine Cornette de Saint-Cyr. This 46-year-old novelist explains that she was “flabbergasted” after reading the testimonies published in November by the daily. Stories in all points similar with her own experience, on which she had written in 2018 in her book Feathers under my quilt.

Except that in this text, “the narrator behaves according to the attitude [qu’elle aurait] liked to hold, that is to say that she manages to escape sexual intercourse ”, nuance the writer today. “Because I hated myself for being weak. For not having succeeded. ”

Facts resembling rape

Because in the facts she describes, Amandine Cornette de Saint Cyr has a sexual relationship with Patrick Poivre d’Arvor. In May 2009, once again at the Cannes Film Festival, the writer told Release have been invited by the presenter to climb the stairs with him. But when they arrive at the hotel where they were to meet, she says he is not ready and asks him to go up to her room. Once she gets there, already “cornered and taken aback” by this turn of events, she stumbles upon PPDA naked in a bathrobe.

“I’m stuck because we’re in a room. I still find it a little stiff that he throws himself on me like that, that he acts like that, cold, ”she describes. This is where an “unexpected” and “unwanted” sexual relationship takes place, to use the writer’s words.

Next: Patrick Poivre d’Arvor and Amandine Cornette de Saint Cyr board a taxi in the direction of the Palais des Festivals. There, at the foot of the steps, the journalist strikes a pose, leaving without further consideration the then 33-year-old young woman to settle down. In the room, this time she pushes back gestures, those hands that “fiddle with” her. “I was a young single woman, recently separated. This relationship should have been rewarding and fun and I was belittled and humiliated. ”

If she rejects the word rape on the grounds that there was “no violence” and that she “could have defended herself”, the legal definition of the term seems to apply, however. In the article 222-23 of the Penal Code, we read in fact: “Any act of sexual penetration, of any nature whatsoever, or any oral-genital act committed on the person of another or on the person of the author by violence, constraint, threat or surprise is rape. ” Facts punished by fifteen years in prison.

For the time being, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor and his lawyer have not commented on these new revelations. And if Amandine Cornette de Saint Cyr does not wish to file a complaint for the time being, justice could of itself reopen the case, especially as PPDA is already the target of a new rape complaint filed at the end of November by the journalist Florence Porcel.

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