The concise response that he finally sent us takes up the fine-tuned arguments of someone facing charges of negligence or complicity in acts of sexual and gender-based violence.
Before Monday’s launch of latest revelations of Release in the PPDA case, we had tried to contact Frédéric Beigbeder, implicated in one of the testimonies of our investigation. He didn’t want to answer us. This Wednesday, he sent us the following text:
“I have no recollection of the 2003 conversation recounted by Bénédicte Martin in Liberation on Tuesday morning. This does not mean that it is imaginary. If someone has harmed Bénédicte, it is important that justice do their job. As for me, I’m sorry if I didn’t react in 2003 as I would today. I was very stupid at the time, but we all already knew that.
Within Article to which the author of 99 francs Bénédicte Martin, who accuses Patrick Poivre d’Arvor of a sexual assault committed in November 2003 in the journalist’s office on TF1, says that at that time she had immediately alerted Frédéric Beigbeder of the events. The latter was then his editor at Flammarion, which had published his collection of erotic stories, Heating.
According to the author’s account, Beigbeder then burst out laughing: “It’s normal, you’re a girl. Arriving then at Beigbeder’s office in Flammarion, Michel Houellebecq reportedly asked what was going on. “It happens that PPDA tried to jump Bénédicte”Beigbeder allegedly replied. And Houellebecq concludes: “Nothing changes then.”
The concise response that he finally sent us takes up the fine-tuned arguments of someone facing charges of negligence or complicity in acts of sexual and gender-based violence. Faced with the same accusations of deafness, former TF1 information director Robert Namias also assured Release I have no memory of the various alerts issued in particular by the former journalist Cécile Thimoreau, while explaining a few months later on France Inter, at the microphone of Sonia Devillers: “The testimonies of dozens of women are heartbreaking […] These women need to be heard and believed. We have to support them.“He also referred to the work of justice by taking note of the classification without follow-up. Was Frédéric Beigbeder “very foolish”, as he says of himself with a hint of tenderness in an ambiguous mea culpa? Or once and for all and again today, stubbornly in tune with the times?