Youthful features, tousled hairstyle, light beard or small mustache, depending on the occasion, the Franco-Spanish Juan Branco, 30, hardly looks like the Russian Piotr Pavlenski, with an emaciated face, cold, pruned with a billhook, wearing short hair . The two men are however linked in the Benjamin Griveaux case.
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The second claimed the publication of the intimate videos of the former LREM candidate for mayor of Paris; the first declares that he is only his lawyer, his legal adviser, without having participated directly in the case. But on several videos, he does not hesitate to say "we" to talk about Pavlevski and him. Monday February 17, Juan Branco shouts with scandal because the parquet floor of Paris would have stripped him of his role of lawyer of the Russian anarchist in the present file. The Paris bar finally decided, the same day, to open an ethical investigation to determine if there is a possible conflict of interest between the young lawyer and Piotr Pavlenski. A new twist for a young thirties who is not at his first glare.
Over-graduate left activist
Born in 1989 into a privileged family - father filmmaker and mother psychoanalyst - he studied at the École Alsacienne, a very posh private establishment in the 6th arrondissement, where he passed his baccalaureate. His resume is long, very long. A graduate of Sciences Po Paris and the École normale supérieure (after entering the application file, and not according to the traditional competition route, and without having the status of student-normalist), he also studied at two Parisian universities (Paris -IV and Paris-I), where he obtained a master's degree in modern literature, a master's degree in political philosophy, another in geopolitics, then a doctorate in international law.
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Beginning a career as a teacher-researcher before interrupting, he worked briefly at Yale University in the United States, the Max Planck Institute for International Law in Luxembourg and La Sapienza University in Rome. He also worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the International Criminal Court, an institution to which he devoted two books. According to his CV, he also said that he was director of cabinet for Aurélie Filippetti during François Hollande's presidential campaign in 2012. She has since declared in L'Express that he was only a parliamentary assistant: “ He never had that title. This character is a great manipulator ”.
Successful essayist, "yellow vest"
Juan Branco has mainly made himself known with his bestseller Crépuscule , a pamphlet published on the internet in 2018 and denouncing the conditions for the election of Emmanuel Macron, the supposed proximity of the President of the Republic to certain large fortunes and, more generally , the Parisian microcosm. Sold in 100,000 copies in its paper version, the book quickly became popular within the "yellow vests" movement, to which it supported. He was particularly present on the spot when certain demonstrators had entered, in January 2019, in the courtyard of the government's parolat, then held by Benjamin Griveaux, by breaking down the door of the building by means of a construction machine. On Twitter, Juan Branco had welcomed this intrusion without having participated directly.
"Outing" by Gabriel Attal
Juan Branco was also the source of a controversy after revealing the homosexuality of Secretary of State Gabriel Attal, linked by a PACS with the counselor of the Elysée Stéphane Séjourné. On Twitter, the leftist activist accused him of having had a "promotion-couch" when entering the government. The enmity between Branco and Attal seems to go back to the Alsatian School, where the two young thirties were students in the second half of the 2000s.
Lawyer at RSA
Juan Branco had already been, for a time, the legal adviser in France of Wikileaks and Julian Assange, whom he had met after opposing the “Hadopi 1” copyright law in 2009. Having taken the oath In 2017, he has since been the lawyer for Jean-Luc Mélenchon (but no longer is) and for the "yellow vest" Maxime Nicolle. He nevertheless received the Active Solidarity Income (RSA) in 2018 and in 2019, declaring that he practiced the profession of lawyer on a voluntary basis. According to his testimony on the CuriousCat site, cited in April 2019 by L'Express , he would have had only " three clients " in two years, including his father. Juan Branco, who is also a journalist according to his biography, continues to be talked about.