The preliminary investigation for rape and sexual assault opened against Jean Lassalle, head of the Rural Alliance list in the European elections, has been closed without further action, the Bordeaux prosecutor’s office announced on Friday March 29, confirming an information Daily South West.
“The investigations do not make it possible to establish the existence of a criminal offense”, considered the prosecution. The investigation, opened in the summer of 2023 and entrusted to the judicial police, targeted “old facts”dating from 2010. According to South West, the 45-year-old complainant claimed to have been raped in a hotel in Bordeaux during the campaign for the 2010 regional elections, for which the former Pyrenean MP was head of the MoDem list in Aquitaine. Jean Lassalle, 68, was heard in a free hearing in November.
“ I am relieved, this period was very difficulthe reacted to Agence France-Presse. I have one certainty, that of having never raped anyone. It is obvious that such news gives me peace “, he added.
Head of list of the Rural Alliance in the European elections
The Pyrenean elected official sat for two decades in the National Assembly, under the label of the Union for French Democracy (UDF), then the Democratic Movement (MoDem) and finally his movement, Let’s Resist!. Mayor for forty years of the village of Lourdios-Ichère in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, champion of rurality, the double candidate for the presidential election did not run in the last legislative elections. He had justified his decision by “medical imperatives”.
He became famous when he sang at the top of his lungs in the Hemicycle in 2003 the Béarnais anthem, Aqueros mountagnos, or by going on hunger strike in 2006 for thirty-nine days at the National Assembly in a highly publicized fight against the relocation of the Japanese Toyal factory to his canton. The atypical Béarnais MP must lead the Rural Alliance list in the European elections alongside the president of the National Hunters’ Federation, Willy Schraen.