The investigation which had been opened in May 2022 after the filing of two rape complaints against Chrysoula Zacharopoulou, the Secretary of State for Development, was dismissed, the Paris prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday, confirming information from BFMTV . This investigation was closed at the end of March for insufficiently characterized offense, said the prosecution. Asked by AFP, Ms. Zacharopoulou’s lawyer, Me Antonin Lévy, declined to comment.
Targeted by two complaints for rape, Chrysoula Zacharopoulou was reproached by patients for the gestures that she would have imposed on them when she practiced as a gynecologist. A third complaint was then filed in June 2022 for violence without incapacity for work by a person responsible for a public service mission.
Accusations “unacceptable and revolting”
After the announcement of the opening of an investigation against her, the secretary of state had rejected the accusations, judging them “unacceptable and revolting”. Chrysoula Zacharopoulou joined the government at the end of May 2022 as Secretary of State for Development, La Francophonie and International Partnerships, to the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, in the government of Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne . She was confirmed in her role in July during the reshuffle.
Elected in 2019 on the Renaissance list in the European Parliament, where she notably sat on the Committee on Women’s Rights, Chrysoula Zacharopoulou is a doctor who has long been involved in the issue of endometriosis. In 2021, it submitted a report on the subject to the French government.
Born in Sparta, she studied in Italy before practicing in France, at the Bégin military hospital in Saint-Mandé in Val-de-Marne, then at the Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP), notably in Tenon in the service of Pr Emile Daraï, under investigation for accusations of rape. The latter, for his part, was indicted in November for willful violence by a person in charge of a public service mission against 32 plaintiffs who accused him of having carried out vaginal and rectal examinations brutally and without ask for consent.