A hundred people entered Tuesday evening, May 30 in the town hall of Saint-Etienne, to demand the resignation of Mayor Gaël Perdriau, indicted in the case of blackmail to the sextape, reported our colleagues of Progress.
In the early evening, dozens of demonstrators had gathered in front of the town hall at the call of the Defeated Committee. This group has met in front of City Hall at every session of the City Council, for the past nine months, to recall the sextape affair and its latest developments.
The demonstrators managed to enter the premises around 19 p.m., before forcing the doors of the council while chanting, pots and pans in hand, "Perdriau resign!" On the spot, the police are deployed and push back the crowd using, in particular, tear gas. According to Le Progrès, the demonstrators had stopped at the threshold of the council chamber.
'Masked and armed'
The municipal majority condemned this intrusion in a statement. "70 to 80 masked people armed with projectiles invaded the city council chamber (...) An officer of the municipal police was injured and many damages were committed within the town hall (...) The city of Saint-Étienne will file a complaint," it reads.
For his part, the left-wing city councillor Pierrick Courbon, in the opposition, deplored a "sad image of our local democracy that the end of the City Council meeting of the day, invested by demonstrating citizens", while declaring that he wished to "give back the floor to the people of Saint-Etienne in a democratic and peaceful way so that they can finally express themselves on the situation in which our city has been stuck since August.
»Indicted
The mayor of Saint-Étienne, ex-LR Gaël Perdriau, was indicted in April for "blackmail" for an intimate video compromising his former centrist deputy. The blackmail concerns the use of a sex tape shot in January 2015 in which we can see the centrist Gilles Artigues, his political rival, being massaged by a man in a hotel room in Paris.
One of the mayor's relatives, Gilles Rossary-Lenglet, had claimed to have mounted this operation at the request of Gaël Perdriau and his entourage in order to neutralize the centrist elected official. Gaël Perdriau has never ceased to proclaim his innocence in the face of the accusations of his former centrist deputy, and has repeated several times that he would not resign.