Damien Abad, former minister and deputy for Ain, was taken into police custody on Wednesday morning by the personal crime repression brigade (PJPP) for alleged acts of “attempted rape”, learned Le Monde from a police source, Friday, June 9. Mr. Abad was released without legal proceedings being brought against him for the time being, learned Le Monde from a judicial source, confirming information from Agence-France Presse.
The former Minister of Solidarity was questioned as part of an investigation into attempted rape targeting him. This investigation follows the complaint filed in June 2022 by a woman who accuses him of having attempted to rape her during a party organized at his home in Paris in 2010.
“I want to be heard by the courts like any other citizen, under any regime whatsoever,” Abad said in a May 17 statement. His parliamentary immunity was then lifted a week later by a unanimous decision of the Bureau of the National Assembly, paving the way for possible police custody.
Charges of rape and attempted rape
The former leader of the Les Républicains deputies was appointed in May 2022 Minister of Solidarity, Autonomy and People with Disabilities, taken from the President, Emmanuel Macron, on the right. The day after his appointment, Mediapart relayed accusations of rape against him, dating from 2010 and 2011. These complaints were closed in 2012, then 2017.
But, at the end of June 2022, a third woman, whose testimony Mediapart published under the assumed name of “Laëtitia”, filed a complaint. According to the investigative site, she is an “elected centrist” who was, at the time of the events she denounces, president of a federation of the New Center youth movement, including Mr. Abad, then deputy European, was the national president. At a party, according to her story in Mediapart, the elected official, who is disabled due to a rare disease, “offered her a glass” at the bottom of which she saw “something”: suspicious, she went spit out his mouthful in the toilet.
Still according to her, Mr. Abad was waiting for her behind the door and everything went “very quickly”: the MEP would have “pushed her into a room opposite” and then tried to force her to perform oral sex. “I was scared, I was flabbergasted. I struggled, I punched him in the stomach,” she said. “Laëtitia” says she was finally able to “get rid of” her alleged attacker and leave the room thanks to the irruption of a guest.
“Chloé”, who had accused the deputy in Mediapart of having raped her in 2010, was heard in January as part of the preliminary investigation opened in June 2022 after the complaint by “Laëtitia”, and again testified before our colleagues. Her story has important similarities to that of “Laëtitia”. She claims to have “blacked out” after drinking a glass of champagne offered by Damien Abad in a bar in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, in 2010. She recounts having then woken up in a hotel room near the bar, “in shock”, “in his underwear” with the feeling of having been “drugged”.
The opening of a preliminary investigation which followed the complaint of “Laëtitia” had weakened the position of the one who became minister, and put pressure on the head of government, Elisabeth Borne.
Mr. Abad had finally left the executive at the beginning of July 2022. Re-elected in the meantime as a deputy for a third term, he has since been discreet at the Palais-Bourbon.
