The former elected environmentalist Jean-Vincent Placé was placed in police custody in the premises of the Brigade for the repression of delinquency against the person (BRDP) because he is suspected of sexual harassment and sexual assault.
The former environmentalist secretary of state Jean-Vincent Placé, in police custody since Monday after the complaint in November from a former collaborator who accuses him of sexual assault and sexual harassment, must be presented Tuesday at the end of afternoon to an examining magistrate, we learned from a judicial source.
The Paris prosecutor’s office on Tuesday opened a judicial investigation “of the counts of sexual assault and sexual harassment by a person abusing the authority conferred by his function” as well as for “sexual assault”, said this source. The former elected environmentalist was placed in police custody in the premises of the Brigade for the repression of delinquency against the person (BRDP), as part of an investigation opened by the Paris prosecutor’s office, after the complaint of a ex-collaborator, Audrey*. The latter had filed a complaint in November 2021, accusing Jean-Vincent Placé of acts of sexual harassment between 2012 and 2016.
The complainant, as well as former collaborators of elected environmentalists, have since been heard by investigators, according to sources familiar with the matter. The collaborator accused him in particular of having “touched his buttocks”, in August 2015 in Lille, on the sidelines of the summer gathering of Europe Ecology the Greens (EELV). The second attack would have occurred in mid-May 2016 in Seoul, during an official trip by Jean-Vincent Placé: in a car, the former secretary of state of François Hollande would have “deliberately touched Audrey’s chest” .
“I will answer”
Contacted at the time of the opening of the investigation, Jean-Vincent Placé had said that he did not wish “at this stage to make any comment”. “I will, of course, answer any questions that may be asked of me by the investigators,” he added. In March 2021, Jean-Vincent Placé was fined for sexual harassment of a gendarme responsible for his security.
In September 2018, he was sentenced to a three-month suspended prison sentence and a fine of 1,000 euros for violence and insults during a party where he admitted having been “extremely insistent” and “moved” with a client.