French civil servant ‘drugged 240 women’ to make them urinate during job interviews
A former civil servant has been accused of drugging more than 240 women during job interviews in order to make them lose control of their bladders.
A former French civil servant has been accused of drugging more than 240 women during job interviews to make them lose control of their bladders.
Christian Nègre, a former human resources manager at France’s Culture Ministry, is awaiting trial on allegations that, over nine years, he provided women with coffees and teas laced with a potent and illegal diuretic that he knew would make them need to urinate.
He would often suggest continuing the interviews outside, taking the job seekers on lengthy strolls far from toilets, the women allege.
The women reported dizziness and trembling. Some were forced to urinate in public, while others wet their clothes, leaving the interview humiliated and traumatised.
“At the time, I didn’t even know this type of attack existed,” Sylvie Delezenne, 45, told The Guardian on Thursday.
Ms Delezenne, a marketing expert from Lille, was job hunting when she was contacted by Nègre on LinkedIn in 2015 and invited to Paris for an interview at the prestigious Culture Ministry building near the Louvre.
Nègre led her to a meeting room and offered her a cup of coffee, which she accepted out of politeness.
She pressed the button on the coffee machine, which was located in a busy corridor.
She alleges Nègre picked up her cup, turned to greet a colleague and then moved across the corridor, before returning and handing her the drink.
He then allegedly suggested going outside to view some monuments, saying, “The weather’s marvellous — shall we keep walking?”
Ms Delezenne said she was led around the Tuileries gardens for a long time, answering questions in an interview process lasting several hours.
“But I felt an increasing need to urinate,” she told The Guardian. “My hands were trembling, my heart was palpitating, beads of sweat ran down my forehead and I was turning red. I said, ‘I’m going to need a technical break.’ But he kept on walking.”
Eventually, she couldn’t hold on — crouching down at the side of a tunnel leading to a footbridge across the Seine.
“He approached, took off his jacket and said, ‘I’ll shield you.’ I thought that was strange,” she said.
Ms Delezenne left the interview devastated, blaming herself for “messing up”. She suffered nightmares, avoided Paris and stopped looking for work.
Four years later, she was contacted by the police.
Nègre’s alleged assaults were first discovered in 2018, after a colleague reported him for allegedly attempting to take a photograph of the legs of a senior official.
During the police investigation, a spreadsheet was discovered on his computer titled “Experiments”, where he had allegedly recorded the times of the druggings and the women’s reactions.
Ms Delezenne’s details had been entered into the spreadsheet, along with photos of her lower legs.
Nègre was placed under investigation for charges ranging from drugging to sexual assault.
He was removed from the Culture Ministry, but continues to work in the private sector while awaiting trial.
The allegations are currently being examined by an investigating judge, with some victims saying the case has taken far too long to come to trial, increasing their trauma.
“Six years later, we’re still waiting for a trial, which is mind-blowing,” one of the women, known by the pseudonym Émilie, told The Guardian. “It’s taking too long. The justice process is bringing more trauma than healing. That’s not what justice is supposed to be about.”
Another alleged victim, Anaïs de Vos, was 28 when she applied for a job as a managerial assistant at the Culture Ministry.
She says she was offered a coffee by Nègre, who went into a corner of the meeting room to prepare it himself, before suggesting they walk outside.
When she started to need the toilet, she asked to head back, but instead, he crossed the road in the other direction.
“He looked me in the eye and said, ‘Do you need a wee?’ It was like an adult talking to a child. I found it bizarre, so I replied quite coldly,” she said.
He suggested she urinate near a storage unite under a bridge, but “I had a warning light in my head telling me there was something wrong”.
Eventually she entered a cafe, but before she could reach the door she began to wet herself. She later felt “really ill as if I was about to faint”.
She told The Guardian she wasn’t surprised when she was contacted by police in 2019.
“I always thought something was strange,” she said. “The justice system has taken too long … For us, it feels like we’re being victimised a second time.”
Louise Beriot, a lawyer for several of the women, told The Guardian, “Under the pretext of a sexual fantasy, this is about power and domination over women’s bodies … through humiliation and control.”
The latest allegations of drug-facilitated abuse, known in France as “chemical submission”, come after Gisele Pelicot, 72, was drugged and raped by her ex-husband, who invited dozens of other men also to abuse her over nearly a decade without her knowledge.
Nègre has declined to comment through his lawyer while the investigation is ongoing.
Some of the women have already won compensation in a civil case against the government, with the Culture Ministry itself not found to be at fault.
Ms Beriot said the case was on an “extraordinary scale” and the unusually long investigation amounted to “secondary victimisation” of the women, some of whom have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“The Pelicot trial was a very important first step, and chemical submission remains a vast issue,” she said.
Originally published as French civil servant ‘drugged 240 women’ to make them urinate during job interviews
