PPDA case: what if justice could circumvent the limitation period?

It is today that it comes out Impunitythe book by Hélène Devynck, in which the journalist takes up the numerous accusations of rape and sexual assault against Patrick Poivre d’Arvor.

She goes back to the rape she herself allegedly suffered in the early 1990s and makes a particularly crude and trying description of it.

Now more than twenty have testified facts that would span several decades. Two new complaints have just been filed, for rape and assault, and a complaint has been sent to the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

From the initiation of the case in February 2021 with the very first testimony of Florence Porcel, and from the rejection of the first complaint in June of the same year, various testimonies clash with the prescription of the facts. This does not prevent the new women from speaking out against the TF1 presenter, with the hope that others will be able to report what they have suffered and that other testimonies can be examined.

“It is almost easier to file a complaint when it is prescribed”, says today Cécile Delarue, one of the women who accuses the PPDA. “We can end up with a very difficult story, which we have hidden, which we have not been able to tell for so long. And we can more easily tell the police or the gendarmes because we know that we still won’t have to hire him behind, because it is so impossible to prove a rape. ”

Examine the gravity of the facts

But justice may have a way to sue despite the expired limitation period, based on on a 2005 jurisprudence of the Court of Cassation.

This establishes it the seriality of the facts would allow proceedings to be initiated, the Versailles Court of Appeal recalled this summer. “In defining this specific connection, it is necessary in particular to establish that it is the same author, a similar modus operandi, and the same victim profile”indicates France Inter.

This would therefore make it possible to postpone the start date of the prescription.

These similarities emerge in particular when reading the latest testimonials published by Publication this week. Assaults or rapes that would take place in the quiet calm of an office or hotel room, targeting young women who came to present their work and hoping for literary advice from an admired and powerful journalist.

“Since it is not violent, it has a certain charm on everything, it helps, we are just a piece of meat. It took me thirty-seven years to put the right words on what happened to me “Says Margot Cauquil-Gleizes to the newspaper.

It is also the complicit silence of the professional entourage of PPDA which appears in numerous testimonies, for example that of the author Bénédicte Martin, who accuses the journalist of having sexually assaulted her in the early 2000s.

He claims to have talked about this incident to Frédéric Beigbeder, then editor of Flammarion, who then laughed. A second violence for her. She now she claims to have it “no memory” of this exchange: “I’m sorry if I didn’t react in 2003 as I would do today. I was very stupid at the time ”.