It is a letter sent by Maureen Dor to the teams of the magazine “Special Envoy”. The 51-year-old Belgian host and actress transmitted this letter when she learned that the France 2 program had collected several testimonies from women claiming to have been assaulted by Nicolas Hulot. In this letter, Maureen Dor assures us that Nicolas Hulot would have “jumped on her” and “tried to kiss her” against her will, when she was 18 years old. The facts described by the host date back to 1989 and are therefore time-barred. Nicolas Hulot is presumed innocent. As part of the broadcast of the issue of “Special Envoy”, Thursday, November 25, we publish his written testimony in its entirety.
My name is Maureen Dor. I was born in Belgium 51 years ago. When I was 17, in the last year of high school, I started working for Belgian television. The following year I read the book Cross roads by Nicolas Hulot, star of the show “Ushuaïa”. I loved this book and had the urge to send him a letter telling him so. Not knowing his address, I wrote to “Nicolas Hulot, Ushuaïa program, TF1, Paris, France”. In this letter, I also told him that I was from Brussels and that I would be happy to show him around my city if he ever came there. I also gave him my phone number since we were “television colleagues”.
What was my surprise to receive, a few weeks later, a phone call from the star telling me that he was coming to Brussels for the book fair and that he would be delighted to meet me. He arranged to meet me at the Hôtel Métropole, a mythical hotel in Brussels. I went there, very happy to have interested the great man, whom I saw appear in the hall. From there we went for a drink at the hotel bar.
“After a quarter of an hour, he tells me that journalists have to come and interview him and he offers to accompany him to his room to wait for them.”
Maureen Dorin a letter sent to “Special Envoy”
And I say yes, of course! I have never seen the rooms in this great hotel – I have never even been to an establishment like this – and I am flattered that he offers it to me.
And now I’m going to start justifying myself, like any woman who’s found herself in a bad situation. I was 18 in 1989, raised in a bourgeois Catholic environment. I am a virgin and above all, I do not find myself particularly sexy. It’s important to say because at the time I sincerely believe that a man can offer to accompany him to his room without having any ulterior motives. I am one of those young girls who do not think for a moment to inspire the slightest thought or the slightest desire of a sexual nature. It’s so far out of my way of thinking!
“So I accompany him and, immediately in the room, here he jumps on me and tries to kiss me. I push him away, astonished and frightened, making him such a naive remark: ‘But you have a wife!’ and him to answer me that it has nothing to do and that I will be a ‘parenthesis’. “
Maureen Dorin a letter sent to “Special Envoy”
At this precise moment, the reception calls to announce that the journalists arrive. He tells me to go, which I do. As the cell phone didn’t exist at the time, I called my best friend from the upstairs phone to tell her what just happened, shocked that the man I admired. did that, but not desperate either. And here she says to me, half combative, half laughing: “Resist Maureen, resist.”
And it is because of what will follow that I think my testimony is worthless: I returned there. When we were in the hotel lobby, he offered to go to dinner with him and some friends of his, and I agreed. Despite what had just happened, I still wanted to go to dinner with him, fascinated by the guy. There you go, this is where I feel like I haven’t been clear with myself.
Certainly, I had been taken aback by his attempt to kiss, by his hands which had gripped my face, but the desire and the pride to have been invited by him were the strongest. What does that say about me, the young girl that I was? I still don’t know. Should I have been traumatized? Was I naive or vicious? Have I “searched” for what happened to me? Did I send signs in spite of myself and him, the adult man that he was, misunderstood and interpreted them?
In the car that took us to the restaurant, he gave me his room number “just in case”. This event must have “worked” me more than expected because during the night, I wrote him a long letter in which I said that it was not necessary to do that to the young girls who admired him. And the next day, I remember going past the line of readers who were waiting for their dedication at the book fair to theatrically drop him on his table what I had to say to him.
“Our meeting, my letter, do not seem to have upset him since a few years later, I met him in the corridors of Canal + without him recognizing me.”
Maureen Dorin a letter sent to “Special Envoy”
Since then, I have often told this story to my friends, without ever feeling sorry for myself. I knew I had avoided something thanks to the arrival of the journalists, but what?
Later, when I was already working on French television, an artistic director of a big advertising agency contacted me to make me, he said, “the face of a big popular cosmetic brand”. A little suspicious – you learn to become one – I called the agency back, which confirmed to me that this gentleman was working for them. I went to the address indicated which was an apartment building, which surprised me, but we are in Paris, I thought, and anything is possible …
I ring the doorbell of the apartment, I hear a voice that says “I’m coming, I’m coming”, while taking a little time and, when the man opens and lets me in, I notice immediately that the apartment is empty, that there is a smell of dirt and greasy hair lying around, and I understand that I must not stay. I tell him that I do not think that this place is conducive to a professional conversation and that I am waiting for him at the bar located in front of his building. He never came. I did not go to the police, and above all, and I still blame myself, I did not contact the agency again to warn them that one of their employees was behaving potentially dangerous towards women.
I am telling this anecdote because it reveals a major fact: I was 18 when I met Nicolas Hulot and I was 25 during the second. However, I am convinced that between 15 years and 25 years, there is a period when girls / women are particularly vulnerable. Like a black hole in their instinct that makes them unable to react as they should to certain situations, or like their self-preservation instinct, later, will cause them to react.
“During this period of life, either the young girl is too naive to consider that she can inspire a desire of a sexual nature in men, or she herself feels a feeling of love which she sincerely believes in the reciprocal on the part of the man she meets. “
Maureen Dorin a letter sent to “Special Envoy”
And it is this ambivalence between his attitude, the way he dresses or behaves and the purity of his emotions that seems difficult, if not impossible, to understand for women and men who have become adults. I say “women and men” because we know that women can sometimes be as harsh and critical in their vision of certain sensitive situations as men.
I was not “damaged” by my meeting with Mr. Hulot. And I’m sincerely afraid of being so much more by the reactions that this kind of denunciation generates on social networks. In addition, I think we can change. You can be a bad guy at one time and realize your bullshit as you get older or have children. I dare to hope that fatherhood has “taught” Mr. Hulot that women should be respected.
“But if it seems that he has continued to take a ‘no’ for what he is, if he has continued to believe that women’s bodies are available to him, then we have to. teaches him that’s not the case. “
Maureen Dorin a letter sent to “Special Envoy”
Like us, women, to whom life “teaches” – and often in pain – to be wary and pay attention to the signals we send or receive. And since it seems that in order to make something understood in the long term, it is sometimes necessary to go through unpleasant means, it is necessary to support the new generation, of which I am not a part but which I watch with respect, when it takes hold of these means arm-the-body, as for a long time some men (not all, far from it and we must never forget it!) seized the bodies of women with their arms.
I am sincerely sorry for the daughter of Mr. Hulot who will discover that her father is not the hero or the man of integrity that she was entitled to hope but I am even more sorry for all the women who have it. learned in pain and unwillingly (it is the case to say it!). Between her and them, I chose them. Because they are also me. And that, I took a very long time to realize.
No woman who testifies with her face uncovered or anonymously does so easily and cheerfully. But some buried pains must come out to make room for new emotions which, for their part, will not hurt.
This speaking being difficult, for my part, it will be unique.
The journalists of “Special Envoy” contacted Nicolas Hulot and his lawyers on several occasions. He refused to answer our questions in front of a camera. His lawyers also declined requests for interviews. Their client strongly disputes the facts and more generally claims to have never assaulted a woman in his life.