The investigation opened in 2019 for sexual assault and harassment targeting former minister Pierre Joxe after the complaint of a former home employee was closed in 2022, the Paris prosecutor's office said on Tuesday, requested by AFP.
The facts denounced occurred in 2018, it was specified in the complaint.
This investigation
“was closed by a classification in July 2022, the investigations having not led to sufficiently characterizing any offense”
, he added.
This classification decision
"seems justified, legitimate to me, and I am delighted about it for Pierre Joxe who was enormously affected by these cases"
, reacted to AFP Me Jean-Yves Dupeux, lawyer for the former minister and former President of the Court of Auditors, currently 89 years old.
The complaint from the former home worker was filed a few days before the defamation trial he brought against Ariane Fornia.
“A tissue of untruth”
The daughter of former Sarkozy minister Éric Besson accused him, in October 2017, at the height of the #MeToo wave, of having attacked her during a performance at the Opéra Bastille in Paris in March 2010. The facts she denounced - a hand on her thigh going up towards her crotch on several occasions - were prescribed.
Pierre Joxe, a Mitterrandie figure and former member of the Constitutional Council, then denounced
“a web of untruths”
and asked for
“a written and public apology”
, which the writer refused to do.
Ariane Fornia, whose real name is Alexandra Besson, was convicted of defamation in January 2020. The Paris criminal court found that she had brought
“discredit and opprobrium”
to the former minister.