UA complaint for attempted rape was filed against the Minister of Solidarity Damien Abad, Monday, June 27, said the Paris prosecutor’s office, confirming information from Mediapart. This complaint is “being analyzed”. According to Mediapart, she was filed by an “elected centrist”, who accuses Damien Abad of having tried to rape her during a party organized at his home in Paris in the first half of 2010.
The person concerned announced in the wake of filing a complaint for slanderous denunciation. “Once again, I strongly contest any accusation of attempted rape or sexual assault,” said Damien Abad in a written statement sent to the press. “I will not let these false and outrageous accusations go unanswered. From that day, I asked my lawyers to file a complaint for slanderous denunciation,” he added.
“It’s an attempt to intimidate other victims,” reacted to AFP Me Raphaële Bialkiewicz, the complainant’s lawyer, assuring that the latter was “serene”. “My client has spoken so that it does not happen again, she responds to the call of Elisabeth Borne” who had invited women victims of sexual violence to file a complaint in mid-June, said Me Bialkiewicz. “She has the intimate conviction that it is necessary to free the voice of women”.
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In mid-June, Mediapart had published the testimony of this woman under the assumed name of “Laëtitia”. She was then president of a federation of the youth movement of the New Center, of which Damien Abad, MEP, was the national president. On the evening of the events, according to her story, he “offered her a glass” at the bottom of which she saw “something”: suspicious, she went to spit her sip into the toilet. Still according to her words, Damien Abad was waiting for her behind the door and everything went “very quickly”: the MEP would have “pushed her into a room opposite”, then would have tried to force her to perform oral sex. “I was scared, I was flabbergasted. I struggled, I hit him in the stomach, ”she says.
Two complaints dismissed
“Laëtitia” says she was finally able to “get rid of” her alleged attacker and leave the room thanks to the irruption of a guest. According to Mediapart, the facts reported by this woman are “supported by the testimonies of eight people, to whom she confided or who may have witnessed certain elements of her story”, and whom the site claimed to have contacted.
She is the third woman to accuse the minister of sexual violence, but to date no investigation has been opened into these accusations. One of them had filed two complaints closed without action. For the other, a report had been made by the Observatory of sexist and sexual violence, but the Paris prosecutor’s office had indicated that it would not open an investigation “as it stands”, for lack of “element making it possible to identify the victim of the facts denounced”.