Laetitia Avia, former LREM MP, is on trial for moral harassment of seven former parliamentary assistants. The public prosecutor unveiled her requisitions on Thursday, June 1.
[Updated Jun 02, 2023 5:02 PM] Trouble continues for Laetitia Avia. The public prosecutor requested, this Thursday, June 1, 2023, at the Paris court, a one-year suspended prison sentence, five years of ineligibility and a fine of 10,000 euros against this former deputy of La République. working. This trial stands for acts of moral harassment against seven former parliamentary assistants.
This professional lawyer had pleaded for release at the opening of the trial on Tuesday, May 9. She called the accusations “contested and decontextualized”. The prosecutor was not convinced by this defence: she believes that the testimonies of the seven plaintiffs illustrate “the excess and the repetition” which characterize a case of moral harassment.
In her speech, the representative of the public prosecutor’s office affirmed that Laetitia Avia would have “denigrated and humiliated” her collaborators between 2017 and 2020. The former deputy would have created “a climate of fear” while soliciting the complainants “24 hours a day. 24”. The lawyer is also suspected of having entrusted her collaborators with missions related to her personal life and not to her function as a deputy.
The prosecution then claims that these years of collaboration have had repercussions on the “physical and psychological health” of Laetitia Avia’s parliamentary assistants. Judgment has been reserved and will be delivered on July 5. The defense, for its part, considered that the seven ex-collaborators had “told their little story a posteriori” with “big lies and developments” over the course of the investigation. Basile Ader, lawyer for a former deputy, believes that the seven plaintiffs showed “tremendous disloyalty”.
Laetitia Avia’s trial began on Tuesday, May 9, 2023. The one who was an LREM deputy for five years until 2022 found herself in the dock at the Paris Criminal Court. This followed an investigation into “moral harassment” of parliamentary assistants. The facts for which she is on trial these days would have occurred between June 2017 and August 2020. As read by the president of the court Sylvie Daunis, echoed by France 3, Laetitia Avia is suspected of having “expressed in public mockery, denigration, humiliating remarks” about the “personal behavior”, but also about the “professional competence” of these assistants with the objective “to destabilize them”. The former MP would also not always have respected “the right to disconnect”. Present at the bar on May 9, the 37-year-old ex-elected denounces for her part since the beginning of the case of “false accusations”.
Note that at the beginning of the case, the timing was rather funny. On May 12, 2020, six parliamentary assistants to Laetitia Avia had indeed accused her in Mediapart of moral harassment with the use of racist, sexist and homophobic remarks. However, the next day, the deputy LREM presented to the National Assembly her bill to fight against … hatred on the Internet. On July 9, an investigation for “moral harassment” was opened by the Paris prosecutor’s office.
A blow in the express political ascent of this lawyer. Early support for Emmanuel Macron, the eighth constituency of Paris elected her as a deputy. She had even become one of the spokespersons for La République en Marche. These six former collaborators had shared with Médiapart their vision of the management of the deputy: a woman described as racist, sexist and homophobic.
“We voted for the PD amendment”; “you’re a fake Chinese, you don’t master the Mac”; “She’s my girlfriend [but] she communicates very badly about what she does. That’s what happens when you put a gay on the com”. Here are the type of sentences that this 37-year-old woman would have sent on private conversations.
Laetitia Avia is also accused of having entrusted tasks relating to her private life to her former collaborators: such as “making an appointment with a notary, reserving a place for her husband at Roland-Garros, buying medical products subject to intimate prescriptions at the pharmacy or even, during the summer, to refresh the legs with the help of an atomizer”, according to Le Figaro.
The former MP has also been unmasked for wanting to rewrite her Wikipedia page several times. “Wikipedia, there are several things to do. We must take control of this page. It is not enough just to delete the paragraph on Le Canard enchaîné, we must rewrite it anyway and source it when we rewrite it.” Here is what she says to a collaborator in order to improve, according to her, her e-reputation.
The Duck chained article in question is the one published on July 5, 2017: he accuses Laetitia Avia of having bitten a taxi driver. In the following months, several accounts tried to water down his Wikipedia page by partially or totally removing the mention of this case. However, the IP addresses of these accounts indicated that it came from the computers of the National Assembly.
On her Twitter account, now deleted, she said in October 2018: “In the political world too, we must fight everyday sexism, inappropriate remarks or paternalism.” One of her former collaborators, however, describes a very distant internal communication: “She often insults the deputies whom she does not like as a ‘whore’. She also makes fun of their physical appearance”.
Laetitia Avia defended herself on Twitter of her methods with Mediapart: “I am a demanding MP towards my collaborators, because they are well paid but I am very flexible on the schedules. I am very little present in the office, so yes we exchange a lot via Telegram”. She has always refuted any harassment and reserved her explanations in court.
The day after her tweet, Médiapart reacted directly by revealing this time voice extracts once again questioning the MP. The media indicates that the ethics officer of the National Assembly has been seized at least six times for actions relating to this deputy. The presidency of the Assembly and that of the LREM group have also been informed, as has the anti-harassment unit of the Palais Bourbon, launched in February 2020, but no investigation or sanction has been considered internally.
In 2017, the one who had just been elected LREM deputy had been the subject of an article that was edifying to say the least by the Canard enchaîné. The palmipede revealed that Laetitia Avia would have bitten a taxi driver, on June 23 at 11:30 p.m., in Saint-Mandé. In question ? The taxi’s credit card payment terminal was out of order. While Laetitia Avia refused to be dropped off at an ATM in order to withdraw the 12 euros needed to pay for the race, the driver would have restarted. It was then that the MP allegedly bit the driver on the shoulder. The police were then called to the scene. According to Le Canard enchaîné, the deputy admitted to having bitten the driver. Once at the police station, Laetitia Avia allegedly filed a complaint against the driver for kidnapping and attempted theft, while the driver allegedly did the same for assault and battery. The trial, which is being held on May 9 and 10, does not, however, relate to these facts.
