A rape complaint was filed on November 24, 2022 by a young woman against Léo Grasset, aka DirtyBiology on Youtube. He was already under investigation for sexual harassment.
The science popularizer pseudo DirtyBiology, and real name Léo Grasset, is the subject of a complaint for accusation of rape, filed on November 24. This legal action was launched by a journalism student from Science Po who accuses him of having raped her in her hotel room in November 2021 when the young woman “was heavily drunk” and asked to go home. . This information provided by Mediapart reveals that the young woman in her twenties had a friendly relationship with the youtubeur, even if the student criticized him for being “very tactile” and sometimes “too raw”.
Léo Grasset defended himself through his lawyers to AFP, indicating that he “firmly contested the accusations”. The Paris prosecutor’s office contacted by the news agency warned that the investigations had been entrusted to the third judicial police district.
The youtubeur already accused by several women
In June 2022, Mediapart had already revealed in a long article that Léo Grasset was accused of numerous behaviors of sexual harassment; another woman was also talking about rape. At the end of these revelations, a complaint had also been filed by a youtuber for sexual harassment. A preliminary investigation has been opened by the Lyon prosecutor’s office. The young woman who would have expressed, one evening at home, her refusal to have sex with the youtubeur but who would have “held her with her hands around her neck”, and “penetrated with very strong blows” .
Following these first testimonies, the young man defended himself on November 19 in front of his 1.2 million subscribers. The 30-year-old had therefore considered that Médiapart had painted a “dishonest portrait”. In his video In response, he admitted having had “volatile behavior” and “full of stories of sleeping around” but refuted these accusations of sexual harassment and rape, which he “categorically” denied. He also questioned the journalistic work, pointing to “truncated quotes” containing “insinuations”, building a “toxic” image of him.
DirtyBiology aka Léo Grasset
The young man in his thirties has been a biologist and science popularizer on YouTube since 2014, counting nearly 93 million views for 1.2 million subscribers. He is also the author of a comic strip entitled The great adventure of sex and scientific books including The big mess of evolution. Interviewed in 2016 by the prestigious Guardian, he gave more details about the role of his YouTube channel; “Everyday animals do things that seem disgusting to us, like cannibalism or incest. My aim is to show that biology, and the living world, is not a world of its own – it is much more interesting than that,” he replied.