The golden age of Nicolas Hulot, host-star of TF1 with his show Ushuaia then champion of ecology who had even won a ministerial seat in the government is over: he decided to leave public life for good. This is the next broadcast – November 25 – of an investigation of the show Correspondent which triggered this radical decision on November 24, 2021 because it concerns charges of sexual assault, rape and harassment of five women. On the set of BFMTV, he answered Bruce Toussaint, accepting all his questions.
The investigation of the France 2 program was carried out over four years and also returns to another case that was revealed by the ephemeral magazine Ebdo, that of sexual violence for facts dating back to 1997 and closed without follow-up in 2008. The author of the complaint for rape is not identified in the article, but it is Pascale Mitterrand, granddaughter of the ‘former president and daughter of Gilbert, who denounced the next day through his lawyer a “media storm“. The complaint had been closed without follow-up, the facts being prescribed, according to the prosecution of Saint-Malo. Nicolas Hulot had for his part assured that the investigators had”very quickly considered that there was absolutely nothing to pursue this matter“.
In front of Bruce Toussaint who asks him if nothing happened with this young woman twenty-four years ago, Nicolas Hulot answers: “Yes, something happened, but in a consent and a classic harmony of a story without a future. “
The former Minister of Ecological Transition, father of three, does not hide his anger at what he considers to be slanderous and vile accusations from women whose names he does not know. He protests against the fact that an investigation is being made on his case, believing that if there are charges, it is up to justice to do so by following the protocol attached to the rule of law. Nervous in front of the cameras, he wants to fight against people who want to achieve his dignity and in particular women who have fueled and built rumors, preventing him from correctly discerning reality.
To close this long interview where Nicolas Hulot’s indignation is as palpable as his embarrassment, the one who launched the Hulot foundation wants to keep his head high and asks those who fight against violence against women: “Use good judgment. You don’t just play with reputation, you play with the lives of the accused. “
His reputation was, especially for those who had read his authorized biography Healthy Nicolas by the journalist Bérengère Bonte (to whom we recently owe Sioux, on Edouard Philippe), that of a seducer and a ladies’ man, as Bruce Toussaint reminds us in front of the cameras. In this book, his wife Florence Hulot confided: “At the beginning, I did not live it well. Now, I put it into perspective. Or I do the ostrich.“