The writer Ariane Fornia, daughter of ex-minister Eric Besson, was sentenced Wednesday in Paris for defamation after accusing on his blog the former minister Pierre Joxe of sexual assault in 2010.
The Paris court ordered Ariane Fornia, her real name Alexandra Besson, to pay one symbolic euro in damages and 3,000 euros in legal fees to Pierre Joxe, who had brought this lawsuit.
The judges also ordered the removal of the disputed remarks and the publication of a judicial communiqué on the blog.
Ariane Fornia needed "to have elements enabling her to support the facts which she publicly denounced", explained the court in its judgment.
"No direct testimony"
"However precisely, the documents produced [...] do not demonstrate that she had the elements enabling her to denounce the acts of sexual assault against Mr. Pierre Joxe", considered the judges.
The court recalled that "Ms. Alexandra Besson did not file a complaint, that Mr. Joxe was not judicially worried about these facts and that there is no direct testimony of the facts denounced by Ms. Alexandra Besson".
In October 2017, in the midst of the #MeToo wave, Ariane Fornia had accused the former president of the Court of Auditors of having put her hand on her thigh several times, moving her up “towards (his) crotch” during of a performance at the Opéra Bastille in Paris in March 2010. Prescribed facts.
"I persist and sign"
In a blog post, the daughter of ex-Sarkozyst minister described a "former minister of Mitterrand", before accusing Pierre Joxe by name in L'Express.
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Pierre Joxe had denounced "a fabric of untruths" and asked for "written and public apologies", which the writer had refused to do. He then sued her for defamation.
"I persist and sign, what I said is the exact truth and I am sure that Mr. Joxe knows it very well," Ariane Fornia had declared in court, on November 18.
The 30-year-old writer had produced documents to attest that she had told these facts to relatives in 2010 or 2011. Pierre Joxe, 85, had meanwhile denounced "insults" and "slanders".
