Fabienne Klein-Donati recounts her first steps as a magistrate when the Grégory affair began

Fabienne Klein-Donati was deputy prosecutor in Épinal between 1984 and 1988. For the first time, she tells from the inside how, from the start of the case, the magistrates did not control their communication with the media.

Grégory, this little 4-year-old boy, was found drowned in Vologne on October 16, 1984. An unsolved crime which the gendarmes are still investigating, 40 years later. This is the first time that honorary magistrate Fabienne Klein-Donati has agreed to speak about this affair. Between 1984 and 1988, she was deputy prosecutor in Épinal (Vosges) and therefore experienced from the inside what would become a real legal fiasco.

It was a live lesson in everything not to do. This is how Fabienne Klein-Donati sums up her first years as a magistrate in Épinal. For her, since the death of little Grégory, on October 16, 1984, and faced with the emotion of an entire country, the magistrates, overwhelmed, absolutely did not control their communication.

“In Épinal, we had neither a prosecutor nor a president who took the subject of communication head-on, says this magistrate. There was no press briefing or press release, so we were invaded in the jurisdiction. Everyone entered the court haphazardly. I had to close the shutters of my office so that the journalists, who had taken up camp in the brasserie behind, would not film or photograph what was happening in my office.”

“I think that, if there had been this mastery of communication, perhaps we could have better controlled the investigating judge.”

Fabienne Klein-Donati, honorary magistrate

at franceinfo

The investigating judge is of course Jean-Michel Lambert, who has been criticized for his numerous speaking engagements, his direction of the investigation and his acquaintance with certain journalists. Fabienne Klein-Donati remembers answering him that he “better keep quiet”. “We were all scratched. Justice as a whole, and the poor little magistrates of Epinal”she says. But a few days later an interview appeared in the magazine She “which has devastated us all, where he expresses his moods”, she adds.

The magistrate dragged this case like a ball and chain and ended up committing suicide in 2017. “He lost his way in the investigation but he also lost his way himself. When I learned of his suicide, I was very affected because we worked with him for four years. is himself misguided and above all he was neither supervised nor supported by the head of the jurisdiction and the head of the court.”

The most telling example that Fabienne Klein-Donati remembers is that of the former president of the Epinal court. “He was fleeing the media, she continuesbut as he could not flee the jurisdiction because he was its president, when he met a journalist who asked him this or that, he replied: ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I’m the clerk here , I make the photocopies. It sounds caricatured, but it was still that. It’s a big waste.”

These are anecdotes which shed light on the legal and media fiasco of the Grégory affair. Fabienne Klein-Donati left Épinal in 1988, much later becoming prosecutor of Bobigny then general prosecutor in Lyon. And she will always keep in mind the need to master communication with the media as much as possible, but also the importance of referring not one, but two or sometimes three investigating judges in the most complex cases.

“Take your time, try to maintain maximum serenity and have as your only guides the code of criminal procedure, ethics and professional conduct”this is how Fabienne Klein-Donati summarizes the lessons she learned from the Grégory affair.