Excluded from LR, Gaël Perdriau attacks the party and Éric Ciotti in court


The mayor of Saint-Étienne has filed a complaint against Les Républicains for “defamation” and against Ciotti for “public insults”, he announced.





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The mayor of Saint-Étienne, Gaël Perdriau, is stuck in a case of blackmail over intimate video.
© JACQUES DEMARTHON / AFP

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Lhe mayor of Saint-Étienne, Gaël Perdriau, mired in a case of intimate video blackmail and freshly excluded from the Republicans, announced Thursday to file a complaint against his former party for “defamation” and against Éric Ciotti for “public insults”. “I am saddened to see Les Républicains renouncing the values ​​of justice, first and foremost the presumption of innocence,” he fumed in a message on Facebook announcing that “these excesses” had “led him to file a complaint” against Les Républicains and the deputy of the Alpes-Maritimes.

The party announced on Tuesday unanimously the definitive exclusion of the 50-year-old mayor after a series of revelations from Mediapart about a sextape blackmail targeting his former first deputy Gilles Artigues. The latter lodged a complaint and a judicial investigation was opened.

“I am shocked by the speed and the conditions under which this decision, disrespectful of my rights and my person, was taken”, continues Gaël Perdriau, who did not wish to speak further Thursday with Agence France-Presse. . The city councilor denies the facts imputed to him by Mediapart and proclaims his innocence, invoking a story which “aims to (the) destroy”.

Gaël Perdriau, mayor since 2014 and re-elected in 2020, specifies in his post to sue his former party for “defamation”, but also Éric Ciotti for “public insults”. In the wake of the Mediapart revelations, the former candidate for the presidency of the party had qualified in a tweet the Loire town councilor as “despicable”. “This lesson giver shows the terrifying face of the worst abjection,” said the deputy of the Alpes-Maritimes, a few months after Perdriau had castigated the right-wing drift of the candidate for the primary ahead of the presidential election. Gaël Perdriau had already been dismissed from his responsibilities as vice-president of the Republicans in December 2021 by Christian Jacob, after his comments critical of Éric Ciotti, already, but also of Valérie Pécresse.

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“Daubing of manners”

The Saint-Etienne affair erupted at the end of August, when a former close friend of the municipality made detailed confessions to the Mediapart site on a “smearing of morals” sponsored, according to him, by the mayor and his entourage in order to neutralize the former -first centrist deputy Gilles Artigues. According to this relative, the operation was paid to him via fictitious services invoiced to two local cultural associations subsidized by the town hall.

The mayor of Saint-Étienne, heard in police custody on September 13, has always assured that he did not sponsor the video where we see the former first deputy being massaged by a man in a hotel room in Paris. He denies having used these images, which date back to 2014, to put pressure on the centrist, in order to dissuade him from any dissent. Mediapart, however, published damning audio recordings in mid-September. We hear Gaël Perdriau talking about this video with his ex-first deputy, referring to a broadcast “in a small circle, with parsimony”, in a conversation dating from July 2018, according to Mediapart. “Once it’s on the networks, it’s no longer blackmail, it’s execution,” he says in another recording from November 2017, according to Mediapart.

The scandal prompted Gaël Perdriau to dismiss his chief of staff and then to step back from his duties as mayor and president of the metropolis, without giving up his mandates. One of his assistants, Samy Kéfi-Jérôme, has tendered his resignation.






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