Former director of human resources at the French Ministry of Culture is accused of drugging more than 200 women during job interviews so that they were forced to urinate on their own clothes
The investigation began in 2019, when Christian Nègre, former director of human resources at the French Ministry of Culture, was accused of having put illegal and powerful diuretics in the drinks of women he invited to carry out job interviews.
O way of working de Nègre, according to the victims, was the following: offering the interviewees tea or coffee mixed with the diuretic and carrying out the interviews outside for long enough to make them become desperate and want to urinate. Some admit to having urinated in public or on their own clothes.
Louise Beriot, lawyer for several of the alleged victims, said that Nègre’s actions were due to the desire to have “control and dominance over women’s bodies under the pretext of a sexual fantasy.”
One of the alleged victims, Sylvie Delezenne, 45, said that she was contacted in 2015, via LinkedIn, for a job offer and that it all started with a coffee that she admitted to drinking, but, before having the opportunity to drink it, Nègre removed the cup from the machine and went to greet a colleague. When he returned with coffee he suggested carrying out the interview outside.
Delezenne said that the interview, held in the Tuileries Garden, lasted a long time and that after several hours he felt “the need to urinate more and more”, along with tremors in his hands and cardiac arrhythmias, but that when he asked for a “technical break” Nègre ignored it and continued walking.
When the feeling became unbearable, she squatted in the street to urinate and that was when the former director of human resources approached her to say that he was covering her with a coat.
Four years later she was contacted by the police and stated that it was there that she discovered that the man who had interviewed her had placed her name along with photographs of her legs in a database entitled “Experiences”. The list allegedly had the names of the various victims, the time they were drugged and their reactions.
Anaïs de Vos, another of the women accusing Nègre, tells a story similar to that of Delezenne, where the then director of human resources, after seeing her in discomfort, asked “do you need to pee?” and he also tried to pressure her to urinate in a place of her choice.
Vanessa Stein, Nègre’s lawyer, declined to comment while the case is ongoing.
Six years after the start of the investigations, the Fondation des Femmes complained in a press release about the delay in the “chemical submission” process, as it describes it, due to the lack of legal resources for cases of sexual violence, arguing that after the complaints are formalized, the victims are abandoned by the judicial system.
The culture union of the General Confederation of Labor demanded that the French Ministry of Culture “recognize its responsibility as an employer” and points to a “systematic problem that allows a public employee to act like this for a decade”.
