L’Obs
Flavie Flament announced that she was filing a complaint against Patrick Bruel for rape.
After announcing to file a complaint for rape against Patrick Bruel on Friday May 15, Flavie Flament gave a video interview to Mediapartin which she returns to the facts but also to the defense of the singer’s lawyers who left her “sans voix”. She explained that the dozens of testimonies from women against the man had pushed her to testify without anonymity.
To the accusations of rape, which would have been committed in 1991, when the host was only 16 years old, the singer’s lawyers assured: “Indeed, there was an episodic and consensual relationship between them. She was 16 and at the time, nothing prohibited a relationship between a minor and an adult over 15.” A defense by which she said « sidérée » and assures that he does not “Never had a relationship, whatever it may be, with Patrick Bruel, never.”
In this interview, given on Saturday May 16, that is to say before Patrick Bruel spoke publicly about these accusations, Flavie Flament puts forward: “I know the price to pay, I have already paid it once, and I also know what awaits me.” Ten years earlier, she had accused photographer David Hamilton of rape.
“That’s terrible.” (…) Je suis un objet.
“It’s a long process to speak out and to speak out so publicly. […] I told myself that my voice would certainly echo voices that we have been hearing for years now, for weeks. And these voices that I feared might, at some point, die out in the noise of the world.”
She returned to the facts she denounces: “Age 16 is normally the age of the first emotions. This is not the age of rape in a Parisian apartment.” She evokes a « black-out total » after drinking tea in the singer’s apartment: “I have an extremely precise memory of the moment when I come out of this state, when I open my eyes. And there I see him, we are on his bed, and he is putting my pants back on.”
She continues: “And my thoughts are extremely powerful, they are astonishingly vivid. On the other hand, my body doesn’t respond, there’s a lag, so it’s an immense fear. And I absolutely don’t understand anything that happened to me at that time. But above all, I am realizing that he is getting dressed, that he is buttoning my pants, and that he is on his own business. That’s terrible. (…) I am an object.”
The Paris Public Prosecutor announced on Sunday May 17 that Patrick Bruel was the subject of four complaints in the Paris region, not counting the one announced by television host Flavie Flament. According to an AFP report, three investigations have already been opened in France and Belgium.
