A complaint for violence and harassment has been filed against LREM MP for Loire-Atlantique Anne-France Brunet by a former parliamentary assistant, AFP learned on Saturday from her lawyer.
“My client, Mrs. Camille Jaffrelo, is part of a long process of forced team management, like one person before her and another after her. Everything is fine at first, then the person is denigrated, isolated, and no longer has a job, which is characteristic of harassment,” Maître Philippe Blanchetier told AFP.
The charges extend from February to July 2018, according to the complaint sent on Tuesday and consulted by AFP. The MP for the 3rd constituency of Loire-Atlantique (Nantes, Saint-Herblain) then hired Ms. Jaffrelo, then 22, on a fixed-term contract, in parallel with her studies in business school.
The “fourth employee on sick leave for overwork in one year”
“At the time, Ms. Jaffrelo was very young, relatively impressionable and impressed, she had to leave political life to reach a level of consciousness that would allow her to report the facts”, comments Maître Blanchetier. Ms. Jaffrelo is now in charge of communication for the energy distribution and production group GazelEnergie, after having been an unsuccessful candidate for the departmental and regional elections.
In her complaint, the young woman describes “incessant phone calls sometimes at very late hours” on her personal phone, unpaid working days, “public humiliation” causing stress and weight loss. When she was placed on sick leave for “stress at work” in July 2018, she claimed to be the “fourth employee on sick leave for overwork in a year”.
The lawyer also reports a scene of “violence” on the day of the end of the CDD of his client who would then have been “rushed against a pole in the permanence of the deputy” and would have “had his foot crushed” by Mrs. Brunet, causing “the fracture of a bone of the foot noted by medical certificate”. At the time, Ms. Jaffrelo had filed a handrail.
Contacted by AFP, Anne-France Brunet, who is representing herself in the legislative elections without having been officially invested, denies any form of harassment or violence vis-à-vis her former assistant. “I can assure you that I am neither violent nor harassing my collaborators, all of this is completely false,” she reacted, saying she wondered “about the timing” to file this complaint.