(Paris) Theatrical appearance, verbal ease and commitment to the left of the left after a Maoist youth, Gérard Miller, French psychoanalyst star of TV sets for 25 years, is today targeted by dozens of accusations of sexual violence that he disputes.
After first testimonies published at the end of January in the magazine Shethe 75-year-old psychoanalyst is accused by around fifty women, often much younger than him (and some of them minors), for acts ranging from inappropriate behavior to rape.
The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened a preliminary investigation.
“Certain that I have not committed any offense and ready to respond to each of the alleged facts, I now wish to reserve my word for the judicial institution,” Mr. Miller reacted on February 23 in a written statement.
In Shewhich published new testimonies on Thursday, and Mediapart, some accusers assure that he used hypnosis to attack them in his Parisian mansion, which he denies.
Gérard Miller’s emaciated face, precious diction and scathing witticisms have been known to the general public since the 1990s and 2000s.
A long-time companion of a director 30 years his junior, he blossomed in the media under the wing of famous radio and television hosts, Laurent Ruquier and Michel Drucker, for whom he was a columnist.
” In the audience ”
In a survey ofCorrespondent broadcast Thursday evening on the public channel France 2, collaborators of a program assure that Gérard Miller was “making his market in the public” by approaching young women.
On France Inter radio in the 90s, “he was often criticized for his way of spotting young girls in the audience and going to hook them up during breaks,” wrote his columnist friend, feminist activist Isabelle Alonso, beginning February on his blog.
“He had a reputation for having a marked appetite for young women, but there were no sordid stories about him,” a journalist who worked with him in the Media told AFP and said he was “stunned” by the accusations.
This radical left-wing web TV was created in 2017 by Mr. Miller and current MP Sophia Chikirou, close to the leader of the France Insoumise party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Mr. Miller and Mr.me Chikirou fell out in 2018, against the backdrop of a crisis in the Media.
For the journalist who met him there, Mr. Miller “is in life as on the air, just as theatrical”.
“He constantly gives moral lessons, which can be annoying, but his intelligence saves him,” he continues, describing a “sometimes brittle” character, marked by “the imprint of 1968 and the leftism of the 70s “.
Supporter of Mr. Mélenchon since 2012, Gérard Miller was a communist activist in the mid-1960s, before joining the Maoists of the Proletarian Left.
Lacan
The son of a doctor, from a family of Polish Jews, part of whom died in deportation, he is the younger brother of a renowned psychoanalyst, Jacques-Alain Miller.
The latter is the son-in-law and executor of the French pope of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan.
Gérard Miller “has always been viewed negatively by the community: his media career is, for many psychoanalysts, completely unbearable”, assures AFP Élisabeth Roudinesco, historian of psychoanalysis.
“He uses discipline to interpret, to comment on politics for example,” she denounces.
Mme Roudinesco won on appeal in 2014 a defamation lawsuit brought against him by Judith Miller, daughter of Lacan and wife of Jacques-Alain Miller.
The indictment of Gérard Miller for sexual violence is linked to that of the French director Benoît Jacquot by the actress Judith Godrèche, who was the latter’s companion when she was only 14 years old.
The first accusations against the psychologist arose after the re-emergence of a documentary that he had made in 2011 on Mr. Jacquot. The filmmaker then confided to him that “cinema was a kind of cover” for relationships with minors.