Damien Abad was taken into custody on Wednesday. The deputy is charged with attempted rape.
Damien Abad was taken into custody, LCI announced on Friday. The Renaissance deputy, brief Minister of Solidarity after the re-election of Emmanuel Macron, was heard on Wednesday June 7, 2023 in Paris, by the Brigade for the repression of delinquency against persons, within the framework of the charges of “attempted rape” which he is about. He came out free and remains awaiting a possible indictment, as his entourage told Le Parisien.
If he had so far escaped police custody because of his parliamentary immunity, the deputy of Ain had asked that it be lifted, in accordance with the request made by justice, so that he could “to be heard like any other citizen.” A request to which the office of the National Assembly has acceded and which therefore allows the investigation to take a new turn.
In 2022, a woman accused the elected official of having raped her during a party in 2010. In front of the cameras as well as the investigators, Damien Abad has always denied the facts with which he is accused, highlighting his neuromuscular disease which prevents him from having all his motor skills.
Four women accuse MP Damien Abad of rape or attempted rape, but only one has filed a complaint against him with the Paris prosecutor’s office. This single complaint was enough to open an investigation entrusted to the Brigade for the repression of delinquency against the person and pushed the former and brief Minister of Health to resign in July 2022.
The complainant who accuses Damien Abad of attempted rape spoke at length to RMC journalists about her experience with the deputy of Ain which dates back, according to her, to 2010. At the time, she was an activist at the New Center and him European deputy and, especially national president of the young centrists and played as a form of authority on the militants.
Damien Abad would then have repeatedly offered appointments to the young woman who became a parliamentarian who would have refused them all, according to her, without giving up her political commitment to the respondent. The attempted rape would have intervened later during a party between activists after Damien Abad used “heavy flirting” methods and possibly offered a drugged drink to the young woman, according to the witness’s story.
The woman who gives herself up in the columns of RMC is, to date, the only plaintiff in the Abad case. She explains that she experienced her filing of a complaint as a “duty” after realizing that her experience “was not an isolated fact”. “It was my duty to file a complaint so that it would stop so that women would also be wary in his presence because I never would have imagined that he could do this to me. You never imagine that a man wants to rape you or that he’s going to try to do it or that he’s going to try to drug you,” she said.
