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JUSTICE – A few days before the Tuesday broadcast of Further investigation on France 2, in which Patrick Poivre d’Arvor is the subject of a new rape complainthe had himself filed a complaint with a civil action for slanderous denunciation against 16 women having previously filed a complaint against him for sexual violence or sexual harassment.
Among these women, Emmanuelle Dancourt, who filed a complaint in 2021 against PPDA for a sexual assault of which she was allegedly the victim in 2008, reacts this Friday, April 29 in The Parisian.
“Thank you Patrick for offering us on a plate the trial that we were not allowed to have because of prescription. He shoots himself in the foot”, says this journalist in a video testimony published on the website of the national daily (listen below). “Hopefully this trial will take place, and you will see us all 16 victims arm in arm arriving in court very very determined. Finally we will be able to talk to him eye to eye, if he dares to come.”
“I call it a wet firecracker. He almost makes me pity in fact, because he has only that: to denounce us, 16 people, 16 women for slanderous denunciation. But what a poor defense …”, continues the one who says she was the victim of a sexual assault in 2008, followed by more than a year of harassment on the part of the former star presenter of TF1. “A few women in our group of victims were obviously troubled, were scared, before realizing like me right away that in fact, it was an opportunity, and then above all that it was totally indecent.”
A complaint of “43 pages”
“The complaint, I believe it is 43 pages. It is incredibly violent, for the excerpts I read, it feels like a speech from the 30s and 40s. It’s violent, because he accuses us of wanting to advertise on his back. But who would want to be known for having been raped or assaulted by PDDA?” Emmanuelle Dancourt wonders again.
“He also says that we ganged up on him, when none of them knew each other before. The violence of the words says exactly who the character is. That says it all about him”, she concludes her testimony.
In the eyes of PPDA, the 16 women who are accusing him today are women who have been “rejected or ignored”, nourishing a “bitterness which leads them to commit, out of belated revenge, the crime of slanderous denunciation”.
“We cannot accuse falsely and with impunity,” commented Wednesday to AFP Me Philippe Naepels, lawyer for Patrick Poivre d’Arvor. The journalist had already filed a similar complaint in February, which was dismissed.
In Further investigation released on Thursday, Mathilde (first name changed), at the origin of the new complaint against PPDA, denounces a rape in the premises of TF1 in Boulogne-Billancourt in February 1995.
At the time, aged 24, a journalist who had just graduated, she said that she had been invited to the presenter’s office where he would have “kissed” her and then “tipped on the carpet”. “He took off my pants, he took off his pants and he raped me. I no longer had any reflexes,” she describes. The one who is now in her fifties filed a complaint for rape in Paris.
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