The news fell this Wednesday, February 14, 2024: the current Minister of the Interior Gérarld Darmanin is definitively cleared of the accusations of rape which have hovered over him since 2020. The Court of Cassation validated the dismissal of the case pronounced on appeal , in favor of the 41-year-old politician.
Accused of rape by a woman named Sophie Spatz-Patterson, Gérald Darmanin has just been definitively cleared, after several years of proceedings. This Wednesday, February 14, 2024, the Court of Cassation in fact rejected the complainant’s power of cassation, thus validating the dismissal from which Gérald Darmanin benefited in the investigation for rape which has targeted him since 2020. This decision results in the closure definitive of the case implicating the current Minister of the Interior. Former supporter of the UMP, Sophie Spatz-Patterson accused Gérald Darmanin of having raped her in 2009 in a hotel room. At that time, the young woman had requested the party’s help to overturn a conviction handed down against her by the courts, as part of proceedings with her former companion. She was then put in contact with Gérald Darmanin. If she mentions a rape committed shortly after their meeting, the politician speaks of a consensual sexual relationship.
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Gérald Darmanin accused since 2017 by Sophie Spatz-Patterson
Gérald Darmanin and Sophie Spatz-Patterson would have indeed spent an evening together in a swingers bar called “Les Chandelles”, then in a restaurant, “Chez Françoise”, before returning together, in a hotel on rue Richelieu, and have a sexual relationship. Sophie Spatz-Patterson says she felt like she had to “go to the pan”, in her words, so that Gérald Darmanin helps him. Blackmail that the Minister of the Interior has denied outright since the start of the procedure.
If the legal proceedings were strongly commented on in 2020, you should know that it was in June 2017 that Sophie Spatz-Patterson filed a complaint for the first time against Gérald Darmanin for rape. The case was then closed without further action by the Paris prosecutor’s office, the complainant not responding to court summons. In the process, Gérald Darmanin then filed a complaint for “slanderous denunciation”. The following year, she filed a second complaint for rape, sexual harassment and breach of trust… once again dismissed. Today, the prosecution considers that “the investigative actions carried out did not make it possible to establish the absence of consent of the complainant and did not further characterize the existence of coercion, of a threat , a surprise or any violence against him”.