Piotr Pavlenski and Alexandra de Taddeo will appear before the Paris Criminal Court for “invasion of privacy”.
They are suspected of having recorded and then broadcast these intimate videos on the Internet.
The broadcast of these videos had caused a political scandal. But it had also been “very difficult and very violent” for his professional and family life, Benjamin Griveaux said in January 2021 before the investigating magistrates.
Former Secretary of State and government spokesman, he gradually gave up his political career.
In the wake of the broadcast of the videos and their incredible arrest in Paris, Piotr Pavlenski, 38, and Alexandra de Taddeo, 31, were indicted on February 18, 2020.
The Russian artist, a political refugee in France since 2017, had claimed to have broadcast and edited the videos that Benjamin Griveaux, 44, had sent to Alexandra de Taddeo during their brief relationship, between May and August 2018.
Known for having cut off a piece of his ear, nailed his testicles on Red Square in Moscow or having set fire to the facade of a branch of the Banque de France in Paris in 2017, Piotr Pavlenski had claimed his approach, presented as artistic and activist, under the slogan “pornopolitics”.
The editing of the videos had been published briefly for the first time on a blog on February 1, 2020, then a second time, with strong repercussions, on February 12 on a “pornopolitics” site created by Mr. Pavlenski.
In their order, of which AFP learned on Tuesday, the judges note that both Piotr Pavlenski and Alexandra de Taddeo “acknowledged” having deliberately recorded these images, Ms. de Taddeo explaining that they would keep them as a precautionary measure in order to ” prove” their relationship.
The judges, on the other hand, question the assertions of Alexandre de Taddeo according to which the dissemination of the images “would have been carried out by his companion without her agreeing, or even without her having been informed beforehand”, and rather retain “his direct involvement” in view of “several factual elements”.
Following the opinion of the public prosecutor, the investigating magistrates have definitively exonerated Me Juan Branco, one of Mr. Pavlenski’s lawyers, although they believe that “he probably played an active role in the dissemination of the disputed videos “.
