The investigation opened in 2019 for sexual assault and harassment targeting former minister Pierre Joxe after the complaint of a former home employee was closed in 2022, the Paris prosecutor’s office announced on Tuesday March 26, requested by the ‘France Media Agency.
The procedure was opened to examine the complaint filed in November 2019 by a former home employee “accusing Pierre Joxe of the offenses of sexual assault and harassment”, recalled the prosecution. The facts denounced occurred in 2018, it was specified in the complaint.
This survey “had been closed by a classification in July 2022, the investigations having not led to sufficiently characterizing any offense”, he added. This classification decision “seems to me justified, legitimate, and I am delighted for Pierre Joxe, who was enormously affected by these affairs”reacted to AFP Jean-Yves Dupeux, lawyer for the former minister who was also president of the Court of Auditors and who is now 89 years old.
Accusation of Ariane Fornia
The complaint from the former home employee was filed a few days before the defamation trial he brought against Ariane Fornia. The daughter of former Sarkozy minister Eric Besson – whose real name is Alexandra Besson – accused him, in October 2017, at the height of the #metoo wave, of having attacked her during a performance at the Bastille Opera in Paris in March 2010.
The facts she denounced – a hand on her thigh going up to her crotch several times – were prescribed. Pierre Joxe then denounced “a web of untruths” and asked “a written and public apology”which the writer refused to do.
Mme Fornia was convicted of defamation in January 2020. The Paris Criminal Court found that she had thrown “discredit and opprobrium” on the former minister. The Paris Court of Appeal then overturned this judgment in April 2021, finding that the writer’s denunciations fell within the scope of freedom of expression. Pierre Joxe then filed an appeal in cassation, which was rejected on May 11, 2022. The judgment ruled in favor of the court of appeal, which found that “if the disputed remarks were detrimental to the honor or consideration of Mr. Joxe, they were part of a debate of general interest following the freeing of women’s speech following the Weinstein affair”.