"Despite all this business, I have no regrets" ... Before the investigators who were still questioning him earlier this week, Alexandra de Taddeo did not dodge. The 29-year-old student faces the political, media and judicial turmoil caused by the broadcast of an intimate video sent to her by Benjamin Griveaux, former LREM candidate for mayor of Paris. Chased by the media who camp in front of her apartment in the 16th arrondissement, she has since been walled in silence.
In police custody, she maintained her support for her companion Piotr Pavlenski, indicted, like her, for "invasion of privacy" and "distribution without the person's consent of a recording bearing on words or images of a sexual nature ”. The Russian artist, a political refugee in France and subject to strict judicial control, has publicly acknowledged having disseminated these images on the "Pornopolitics" site in the name of an alleged fight against "hypocrisy".
In front of the investigators of the Brigade for the Suppression of Crime against the Person, Alexandra de Taddeo said that she had contacted Benjamin Griveaux in May 2018, while the latter was still a government spokesperson. She said she asked him as a friend on Instagram, which he accepted. But she maintains that he would have taken the initiative to write to her. This is followed by exchanges of charming photos and videos in private mode. This long distance relationship ends with a brief physical meeting in the student's apartment, but the two protagonists mention different dates.
"I knew he wouldn't hesitate to sink me"
The sending of such sequences - there would have been half a dozen sendings in total - highlights a lightness of the ex-spokesperson. However, Benjamin Griveaux had apparently taken care to configure the application so that the images self-destruct after a short period of time. Why did Alexandra de Taddeo, who was apparently the sole recipient, save them before they were automatically deleted? Did she intend, at that time, to blackmail the politician or to embark on an operation known as "porn revenge" (pornodivulgation)?
On the minutes, after having made it clear to the police that she was not an "escort" girl, she denied any malicious intention, having, she said, nothing to reproach her lover for one night. To justify the copying of the video sequences, Alexandra de Taddeo delivers a sibylline explanation which will undoubtedly deserve some clarifications during the instruction: "I knew that if his wife or someone else learned his relationship, he would not hesitate not to sink in and would not defend me. So I wanted to preserve myself. "
According to her version, the copy of the intimate video would therefore be a kind of insurance intended to prove that she is not a "praying mantis" ready to poach a married man. Oddly, she wants to make it clear to the investigators that Benjamin Griveaux was not to his liking. She also said that she had asked three other politicians.
A transfer without his knowledge
Alexandra de Taddeo ended all relations with the government spokesperson after falling in love with Piotr Pavlenski. Attracted by the character and his profile as a radical artist, she wrote to him in detention when he was imprisoned in October 2017 after having set fire to a branch of the Banque de France, Place de la Bastille in Paris. Their romance was tied up after his release from prison eleven months later. A fusional relationship. "The artist lived from time to time at home," notes a source familiar with the matter.
Newsletter - The essentials of the news
Every morning, the news seen by Le ParisienI'm registering
Your email address is collected by Le Parisien to allow you to receive our news and commercial offers. Find out more
However, Alexandra de Taddeo swears that she is a stranger to putting videos online, a situation she would have discovered a posteriori. She deduces that Piotr Pavlenski, having the password of the laptop where the video was stored, made a transfer without his knowledge.
The applicant did not say anything to the investigators - "Niet" he maintained before the investigating judge who offered to say more. He was more talkative when he emerged free from the Paris court, telling journalists present that he did not want to reveal his source.
It seems that the couple was quickly overwhelmed by the scale of the case which forced Benjamin Griveaux, LREM candidate, to withdraw his candidacy for mayor of Paris on February 14. This undoubtedly explains why, shortly after the video was broadcast, Alexandra de Taddeo reformatted her computer equipment and got rid of a USB key, as she spontaneously admitted in police custody.
