The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed to AFP that it had received a complaint on Monday for attempted rape targeting Mr. Abad, revealed by Mediapart, specifying that it was “currently being analyzed”.
According to the investigation site, she was filed by an “elected centrist”, who accuses Mr. Abad of having tried to rape her during a party organized at his home in Paris in the first half of 2010.
Asked by AFP, the complainant’s lawyer had not responded by the end of the day.
“Once again, I strongly contest any accusation of attempted rape or sexual assault,” said Mr. Abad in a written statement sent to the press.
“I will not leave these false and outrageous accusations unanswered. From that day on, I asked my lawyers to file a complaint for slanderous denunciation,” he added.
In mid-June, Mediapart had published the testimony of this woman under the assumed name of “Laëtitia”.
She was then president of a federation of the youth movement of the New Center, of which Mr. Abad, MEP, was the national president.
On the evening of the events, according to her account, Damien Abad “offered her a glass” at the bottom of which she saw “something”: suspicious, she went to spit out her sip 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” then tried to force her to perform oral sex.
“I was scared, I was flabbergasted. I struggled, I hit him in the stomach,” she says.
“Laëtitia” says she was finally able to “get rid of” her alleged attacker and leave the room thanks to the irruption of a guest.
According to Mediapart, the facts reported by this woman are “supported by the testimonies of eight people, to whom she confided or who may have witnessed certain elements of her story”, and whom the site claimed to have contacted.
She is the third woman to accuse the minister of sexual violence, but to date no investigation has been opened into these accusations.
One of them had filed two complaints closed without follow-up. For the other, a report had been made by the Observatory of sexist and sexual violence, but the Paris prosecutor’s office had indicated that it would not open an investigation “as is”, for lack of “element allowing the identification the victim of the facts denounced”.
