MP Damien Abad is still under investigation for attempted rape. This is what is recalled by the testimony of the complainant who denounces this Wednesday on RMC a form of failure to take into account the accusations against the elected member of the National Assembly.
Under investigation for attempted rape since July 2022, Damien Abad is discreet. But the spotlight is again on the deputy for Ain this Wednesday, December 21, 2022 with the testimony of the woman, also elected to the National Assembly, who filed a complaint against the politician. At the microphone of RMC, the complainant returns to her story and takes care to recall the charges against Damien Abad. Because this is where the objective of his speech seems to be: to put an end to the “feeling of impunity” and to the honors granted to the deputy of the presidential majority. The testimony is therefore intended as a direct response to the appointment of Damien Abad as president of the Franco-Lebanese friendship group on December 7. The title, if it does not grant any power, is nevertheless accompanied by a status, that of intermediary between the President of the Republic and Lebanese foreign diplomats. When Damien Abad was appointed, the elected complainant said she was “afraid that justice would be obstructed by giving too much power to a person who [l]’attacked and who tried to [la] violate.”
Damien Abad is still defending himself against rape charges
Four women accuse MP Damien Abad of rape or attempted rape, but only one has filed a complaint against him with the Paris prosecutor’s office. This single complaint was enough to open an investigation entrusted to the Brigade for the repression of delinquency against the person and pushed the former and brief Minister of Health to resign in July 2022. From the first hours of the case, Damien Abad claimed to be innocent and has held the same line of defense ever since. And covered by the presumption of innocence, the elected official regained his seat as a deputy after his hasty departure from the government. A decision that did not please all the parliamentarians of the Renaissance group. Invited to discretion the months following the accusations, did Damien Abad think that the water had flowed under the bridge enough to, in December, apply for the presidency of the France-Lebanon friendship group? And did his fellow deputies have the same thought when appointing him? It is clear that the complainant, who also sits in the Assembly, was shocked by the maneuver and sees it as a form of “impunity”, writes RMC. Worse, according to her, this honor granted to Damien Abad is “a bad signal for the proper functioning of justice.”
At the beginning of December, when the appointment was announced, the plaintiff was not the only one to jump on hearing the news. Green and left-wing deputies also said they were “shocked” according to BFM TV. Some had even seen it as the expression of a double standard when the presidential majority had just fired red balls at the left shaken by the Quatennens affair. “I do not mind Aurore Bergé giving us a moral lesson on Adrien Quatennens, but we cannot proceed this way”, had judged the elected ecologist Sophie Taillé-Polian.