“The trainees, it's still made for making pipes and coffee.
The sentence is looping this Tuesday, International Women's Rights Day, on social networks, relayed massively by opponents of Éric Zemmour.
It is attributed to the far-right candidate (Reconquest!) for the presidential election, by a former colleague of the journalist at the time, which Mediapart echoes on Tuesday.
The news site published a 36-minute video investigation on Tuesday morning bringing together the testimonies of eight women who accuse Éric Zemmour of "inappropriate behavior and sexual assault" from 1999 to 2019, when he was a journalist.
No complaint has, to date, been announced.
“Mediapart wants to make a splash on Women's (Rights) Day by recycling testimonies already released last year.
Shabby at five weeks of the first round ”, reacts the entourage of the candidate.
"Blocked against the elevator wall and forcibly kissed"
Having become an engineer, Claire recounts a brief internship, at age 18, at Le Figaro in 2002. Called to help the editorialist with a computer problem, "I feel his hand on my back going back and forth from bottom to top", says- she.
Pascale Sauvage, a former colleague of Éric Zemmour at Le Figaro, reports having spoken to the former journalist about it.
"I told him, you don't touch the intern".
“He tells me
if now we can no longer flirt with trainees... Trainees are all the same made for making pipes and coffee
.
He told me that, I'm sure.
»
Pascale Sauvage, former political journalist at Le Figaro, reports the words of Eric Zemmour in a Mediapart survey
"Interns are for making pipes and coffee" pic.twitter.com/Pd7O0f6qiy
— the real julie (@juliehenches) March 8, 2022
Another former intern, Séverine, accused her, in 1999, of "very raw proposals for sexual relations" and of having "blocked her against the wall of the elevator and forcibly kissed her on the mouth".
Among the other testimonies, Gaëlle Lenfant, former head of women's rights for the Socialist Party (PS), also accuses the former columnist of having "kissed her by force" during a PS summer school in La Rochelle in early 2000s. She spoke April 24, 2021 on Facebook about it.
On December 9, 2021, on France 2, questioned on the previous articles of Mediapart, Éric Zemmour had felt that he “did not” have “to answer.
I'm not talking about my private life, these women accuse me, without any proof, it's word against word.
