One of the two women who accused the new Minister of Solidarity Damien Abad of rape told AFP on Sunday that she was "relieved" by the revelation of her complaint in Mediapart, when she had tried to make her story known " especially among Republicans.
"I'm relieved that it's coming out, because I had knocked on quite a few doors for someone to do something after the complaint was filed, which I found unfair," said Margaux, who did not did not want to make his surname public.
Damien Abad, 42, appointed Minister of Solidarity on Friday, faces accusations of rape revealed on Saturday by Mediapart, which he contested "with the greatest force".
Two women accuse the former president of the LR deputies of rape in 2010 and 2011, including Margaux.
“What hurts us is that he is everywhere, and that no one cares”
The complaint she filed in 2017 was dismissed.
"A lot of people knew about it," says the 35-year-old former centrist activist, but some "preferred to look elsewhere rather than ask for more."
“I tried to make it known, within the Republicans in particular”, she said, referring in particular to a telephone conversation with Anne Méaux, the communicator of François Fillon, in 2017, also reported by Mediapart.
But "no one from the Republicans contacted me," she said.
“What hurts us is that he's everywhere, and nobody cares,” she says.
"Whether he's in government or not, that doesn't concern me.
What concerns me is that there are no more victims”.
Read alsoDamien Abad: what we know about the accusations of sexual violence against the new minister
In her testimony to Mediapart, which she confirmed to AFP, Margaux denounces facts that allegedly took place in 2011. She had met Damien Abad in 2009, when she was vice-president of the Young Democrats in Paris.
In January 2011, she would have found him one evening in Paris and they would have had a sexual relationship at first consented then forced, imprinted with “disrespect, injunction and insistence”.
She says she went to a police station to testify, then filed a complaint in 2017. The Paris prosecutor's office confirmed "that a first complaint filed for acts of rape was dismissed on April 6, 2012", and that a "second complaint filed by the same complainant for the same facts was dismissed on December 5, 2017, after a preliminary investigation, for lack of a sufficiently serious offense".