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L’former French skating boss, Didier Gailhaguet, had the State condemned on Friday to pay him 5,000 euros in moral damages for having “pressured” to obtain his resignation from the federation in early 2020 because of a scandal of violence sex within the discipline. In this decision consulted Monday by Agence France-Presse, the administrative court of Paris considers that the Minister of Sports Roxana Maracineanu “exerted pressure […] decisive” to bring him to resign, preventing the French Ice Sports Federation “from speaking out freely on the subject”.
Fifteen days before her resignation, several former skaters, including Sarah Abitbol in her book Such a long silence, had accused their former coaches, notably Gilles Beyer, of rape and sexual assault. Didier Gailhaguet, who had presided over the FFSG since 1998 – with the exception of a parenthesis between 2004 and 2007 – had been accused of having kept the latter in the skating circuit, despite suspicions in 2000, which he defends himself.
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Didier Gailhaguet, who had first made an administrative appeal without success, then brought the case before the administrative court. He accepted one of the arguments of the former boss of the FFSG, who considered that the minister, by public speaking, “interfered in the competences of the federation to impose his resignation while the conditions for revocation of the mandate of the president are strictly defined in the statutes of the federation and exclude any intervention by the State”.
Omerta to the Federation?
Didier Gailhaguet claimed 152,550 euros corresponding to the 27 months of compensation he would have received according to him if he had gone to the end of his term, as well as 150,000 euros in non-pecuniary damage. Justice found him wrong on the first point, but awarded him 5,000 euros in non-pecuniary damage, considering that “his image and his reputation [avaient] suffered”, in particular because “the alleged facts had not yet been established and could not be imputed to him”. In a press release, his lawyers Mare William Bourdon and Brengarth hailed an “exceptional” decision which “sanctions the interference of a minister […] for purely political purposes. “It gives him back his unjustly flouted honor within the ice sports community and more generally the national sports movement”, according to them.
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Following the revelations of Sarah Abitbol, the Ministry of Sports had launched an investigation with the General Inspectorate of Education, Sport and Research (IGESR). His report scratched the functioning of the FFSG marked by “a strong concentration of powers”, in particular in the hands of Didier Gailhaguet, source of a “form of omerta”.
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