Their testimonies were “classified without follow-up”. A book now tells the rest of their story. In “Impunit”, published this Friday by Editions du Seuil, the journalist Helen Devynck who accuses, like many other women, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor of having raped her, develops his perception of “the construction of impunity”. The defense of PPDA, presumed innocent, has already planned to retaliate, reports AFP. Mrs Devynck “will answer to a judge, like all these false victims“, indicated the lawyer of the former star of 8 p.m., Philippe Naepels, to the press agency.
The author, already targeted by a complaint for slanderous denunciation following having accused PPDA of having raped her in 1993 when she was his assistant at TF1, seems to have anticipated this reaction. “The threat of defamation hangs over every word of mine,” she writes in “Impunity”. “I can’t prove that Patrick Poivre d’Arvor raped me. I never can. The facts are prescribed. They will never be judged”, she laments. His book is meant to bea letter, a tribute” to the women who testified, she told AFP. It also has an ambition: “showing the fabric in which impunity is woven”.
Three open investigations
Since the beginning the filing of a complaint for rape by thewriter Florence Porcelin February 2021, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor was the subject of three surveys. Two are underway in Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine): a preliminary investigation in which he was heard in free hearing last July and where at least seven women testified; and a judicial investigation relating to the accusations of rape by Ms. Porcel.
Hélène Devynck and 22 other women testified during a first investigation, closed without further action in June 2021, mainly for prescription. “The classification without follow-up has demonstrated the banality of impunity”believes the complainant. “We felt like we were being thrown away, as if we hadn’t spoken, as if we had done nothing. I wanted to tell this story”, she explains to AFP.
271 sober pages where the author gives voice to the chapter to her “sisters of misery” : their “stunned” in the office of PPDA, this “extreme experience of humiliation” they describe, then their “strategies” to live following. Tales of loneliness, until this year 2021, where they discover that many are testifying. They meet around a dinner. “For the first time, we were safe,” remembers Hélène Devynck.
“Criminal System”
This journalist and screenwriter grew up in Paris in a bourgeois family, “in the illusion that women were men like the others”, but quickly collides with “the quiet enormity of misogyny” of the audiovisual world, the one that “prepare our rapes”.
In his view, the PPDA affair cannot be reduced to “a man” : the author questions the responsibility of TF1, and a “criminal system” maintained by aculture of silence, tinged with complacency or indifference. A culture supported by everyone champ lexical. “Rape is a dirty word”, she writes. “He splashes obscenity around him. To this day, I still happen to imagine him flashing in my face when a hint of embarrassment sets in.”
“Predator”? “The word bothers me”. “It evokes big cats, where I only see the smallness of compulsive repetition”. “I was not raped by an animal but by a man superbly integrated into the community”she accuses. “Consent” ? “To consent is neither to ask nor to desire. It is to accept a proposal or even a pressure. The word itself implies a hierarchy between the one who proposes and the one who consents”, she analyzes. “Victim” ? Word “already poses, in itself, almost insoluble problems“… Most “by transforming the vocabulary, we change the life”she hopes.
