Pierre Palmade was 24 when, at the end of a drunken night in Saint-Tropez, Johnny Hallyday offered to take him to his villa on a motorbike. It’s 6 o’clock in the morning. “And then I say to myself: ‘We’re going to die’, because it conducts, let’s say, ethylic matter”says the comedian at the microphone of “Rire et Chanson” in 2020. “We will say: ‘Johnny is dead, he was accompanying someone’, and my death will go completely unnoticed. » General marrade in the studio.
Pierre Palmade is not dead, this February 10, on a departmental Seine-et-Marne. But a 6-year-old child is disfigured, a mother has lost her baby and a 40-year-old man is still in a coma. While 700 people are killed each year in road accidents linked to taking narcotics, this tragically banal tragedy has not gone unnoticed.
Hours of airtime on continuous news channels and on the public service, dozens of unearthed archive videos, a lynching in order on social networks, and an interior minister who makes announcements. What is now called the “Pierre Palmade affair” seems to have swallowed up everything in its path, from pension reform to the war in Ukraine. Each day brings its share of twists and revelations serving to feed the commentary machine.
After BFM Business, launch of BFM Pierre Palmade – https://t.co/Cvrv2jhivC
In this story with drawers, everyone projects their fears, fantasies and obsessions, signs of a society considered sick: drugs, mental disorders, prostitution, the star system, justice deemed to be failing, pedocrime, and even immigration and fetal status. Addictologists, former followers of chemsex, specialist lawyers, former magistrates, celebrity journalists, notorious populists and amateur lawyers have thus succeeded on television sets. BFM-TV and “Touche pas à mon poste” were even dig up a young lover of the 1990s star, recounting in detail his intimate relationship with the fallen comedian. As often in this type of business, “exclusive” testimonies are collected: the artist’s neighbor found him polite; the baker from Cély-en-Bière (Seine-et-Marne) confirms that he bought her pastries; the taxi driver who took the two fugitives to Paris explains that they did not say a word during the journey.
Ambient cacophony
In this ambient cacophony, where any reasonable and nuanced commentary is irremediably swept away, the images remain. Who turn in a loop. Those of a car wreck, of a raided farmhouse, of Pierre Palmade leaving police custody. And the photo of the 6-year-old child on his hospital bed, transmitted by the family to BFM-TV.
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