"Quite the opposite": the former deputy LREM Laetitia Avia defended Wednesday to have morally harassed her parliamentary assistants, invoking the constraints of political life as her workload in the National Assembly and castigating "lies". The former deputy of Paris is suspected of having "denigrated" seven of her collaborators between 2017 and 2020, created a "climate of fear" and demanded "abusive working hours" as well as undue tasks related to her personal life, according to the prosecution. The 37-year-old lawyer arrives at the bar after the testimony of her former parliamentary assistants: "Today, we are portraying the opposite" of what she was then, she begins.
'Strengths and weaknesses'
"I am an extremely rigorous person" but "I am not in this doctrine of saying: 'you have to be strong at all costs,'" she says, ensuring that she has "shared her strengths and weaknesses" with her team. Questioned by the president, she confirms that when she arrived at the Assembly, at 31 years old, she had "no training, on nothing". "We do not immediately understand the extent of our missions, nor those of the collaborators," she summarizes. The complainants described abundant solicitations outside working hours, until very late at night, on Telegram loops, "the tool of Macronia", confirms the former LREM spokesman.
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"The sessions in the Assembly ended at 1:00 am" and after, "political life continues" with the "debriefs", the preparation of the "mornings", she quotes, saying that she "always finished after" her collaborators. As for her often "contradictory" requests, she says that she "sometimes" changed her mind in the night but that "the vast majority of the time, I had a message from the government asking me to change gears! That's the way it is, it's part of this political life." Behind her, her former collaborators, most of whom stayed only a few months before leaving, shake their heads regularly during the two-and-a-half-hour interrogation.
"Hide"
The president of the court Sylvie Daunis reads comments on a loop dedicated to employees, without the deputy: "I'm going to get high", "Hide to the max we will take for our rank", "I just took me a monumental scud". "How do you explain these fears?" asks the magistrate. "Seeing" that his assistants "spend their days vomiting on me, it was astounding," replies Laetitia Avia, who defends herself from being "aggressive" and "screaming". "Sometimes they set things up in their heads (...) There is a group effect," she says. She "strongly denies" having said: "use your brain to think", having introduced two collaborators to other deputies as her "new slaves", or having nicknamed "daily" an assistant "table bin".
The latter also explained that her boss criticized her way of eating, dressing, her hair "white and dry". Laetitia Avia admits to having made "once" a remark to her after a dinner where she had "chewed quite hard with her mouth open" and that people "stared at her". "Never" she targeted her "white hair" but her "hair at all", because she "arrived on the move" without having "passed a comb". "I told her she had to be treated," the defendant said. The president continues her questions: did she create a group called "Biiiitch talking" to make fun of an employee who had just left? "I made gamineries," replies the ex-elected, ensuring that she was not alone in "criticizing".
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The purchase of medicines she asked them for? For the "office pharmacy" or a "November 11" where she was working and not feeling well. Booking a restaurant for Valentine's Day with her husband? This was "field" work because she was always in "representation", she replies. The president notes in particular that three employees said they had lost confidence in themselves after her criticism, which they said had weighed on their professional ambitions. "I think these are lies," says the former elected official, shaking her head. Scheduled for two half-days, the trial is finally scheduled to continue on June 1.