JLike many others, I have always been an avid reader of your journal. I am contacting you today because I am disappointed with the article in World published on March 15 relaying new accusations against Patrick Poivre d’Arvor. Your journalists therefore conducted the investigation. I would like to call you through this letter to simply be more sober. Several elements challenge me and prevent me from seeing in this paper a demonstration of intellectual honesty and balance of points of view.
First, what was my surprise to discover the detail with which each testimony is recorded. Do we really need this? Do you think it serves the purpose? Perhaps the journalists believed they gave more weight to the words of these women by relaying them in such an exhaustive way? “He called late at night to ask her if she didn’t feel like fucking”, “One hand in my bra, the other in my panties”, “You pressed your breasts against my back”. .
[…] This is a display which, in my opinion (but obviously your editor-in-chief did not share this opinion, which is what I deplore) and at best, serves the existing voyeurism trend. probably somewhere in each of us, but at worst – and this is far more serious, reflects the desire to humiliate. This shocks me deeply, because this is certainly not the role of your journalists (I will pass on the anonymity of the majority of your testimonies which does not seem to me to be of the level of your newspaper either).
And this display lasts, lasts and lasts. It is necessary to read lines of it before arriving at the counterpoint which you offer to all these testimonies. Because there is the second problem that I see there. It is very thin, this counterpoint, for what you qualify as an investigation. Making the voice of your daughter or lawyer heard seems like a checkbox. […] It’s astonishing, moreover, that his daughter contacted you. Why did your investigators, so quick to collect the testimonies, not take the trouble to contact the family themselves? We can be surprised.
Finally, it seems to me that a press release from the Nanterre public prosecutor’s office was published a few days later. It reassured me, you know. I would not therefore be the only one to consider that relaying all this without counterpoint, without distance and in detail, was, after all, not completely normal.
May I allow myself to point out to your journalists that if they wish to do justice themselves, professional retraining, even late, is entirely possible? If, however, they retain a high idea of what their job is, may they contribute to the liberation of women’s voices in a balanced, balanced and empowered manner. Let them show what deserves to be seen, and no more. Let them grow the reader by presenting each other’s positions to him. Let them keep a distance on their subject.
These women obviously deserve to be heard. They are. You are the relay and that is happy. But present us with full information, an investigation that is not simply a burden and does not seek to convince by humiliation. We do not expect this from your journal.
As it is never too late, I continue to hope that you will also relay the press release from the Nanterre public prosecutor’s office, which recalls some fundamental principles. Oh, not much, just respect for the presumption of innocence and privacy of the victim.
Caroline Papazian, Paris
Gilles van Kote, deputy director of “Monde” for relations with readers, answers:
Your message raises some questions that are regularly asked when we publish articles on sexual violence. But before answering it, I want to make it clear that we never seek to humiliate anyone. You mention respect for “the privacy of victims”: we have never failed to do so, the people questioned having confided in the authors of the article with full knowledge of the facts. Conversely, these journalists have deliberately chosen to exclude certain quotations which they considered unnecessary to be explicit.
Moreover, you are surprised that our journalists did not themselves solicit the daughter of Patrick Poivre d’Arvor before she appeared. I admit that this seems to me rather to be to their credit: would it not have been indelicate to solicit this person to make him react to the accusations of sexual violence brought against his father, knowing that none of the testimonies collected put in because of his family members?
In these cases of sexual violence that have emerged in the wake of the #MeToo movement, it is not for us to substitute for justice or to transform into a people’s court, as we can sometimes read. Everyone has their own job: ours is to gather substantiated information on subjects of public interest and put them into perspective. And if some people consider themselves defamed, the law allows them to sue us and – if necessary – to have us convicted.
Whether we are talking about incest, pedophilia or violence against women, today we are no longer in the field of news items, which is what the expression “gutter press” used by some seeks to bring us back to. commentators, but in a fundamental movement that affects our society and that it is up to a general information media like ours to follow, review and analyze. Thus, the Duhamel affair – to which some reproach us for having given too much space – is not only a sad news item but the emblematic expression of an open breach in the law of silence which has always imprisoned victims of incest.
The work carried out by the authors of the article devoted to the accusations against Patrick Poivre d’Arvor consisted in collecting the testimonies of many women, who all described the same modus operandi, and in ensuring the credibility of these testimonies. And if some have chosen to remain anonymous, I think we can understand the reasons and not think that they have fabricated. As for the content of these testimonies, it seems normal to me to deliver extracts from them to the readers, as raw as they are, because nothing can replace them to illustrate the mechanisms of sexual violence. It is not a question of sensationalism, but of describing a phenomenon in what it can have of violent and traumatic.
I grant you the result is overwhelming. But is it not rather the testimonies that overwhelm? As for “Balance of points of view” that you wish, even if it may seem somewhat illusory in this type of case, I noted that no less than eight people cited in this article – that is to say as many as the accusers – are there in the defense of Patrick Pepper of Arvor, while the latter did not follow up on our proposal to speak on the testimonies implicating him. It is his most absolute right, but this necessarily limits the contradictory
Finally, I would like to point out to you that the press release from the Nanterre public prosecutor’s office that you mention was published after the publication of erroneous information in certain media, including The world was not part of it.