The news has just fallen this Friday, June 17, 2022. Jean-Jacques Bourdin is fired from the continuous news channel BFMTV and the radio station RMC. The management of Altice Media has announced that it will cease all collaboration with its 73-year-old star journalist, who has been off the air since January after the opening of an investigation for sexual assault, which has since been closed for prescription. “Due to the events that occurred and were brought to the attention of management during the year 2022“, the group has”decided to put an end to the employment contract of Mr. Jean-Jacques Bourdin and thus cease all collaboration“we learn in a press release.
Several months after being removed from the antenna, no return date but rather a formal dismissal. Recall that Altice Media had launched an internal investigation in mid-January when a scandal broke out in the press: Jean-Jacques Bourdin was the subject of a complaint for sexual assault. In the process, the Paris prosecutor’s office also opened an investigation.
If until then the identity of the complainant had been kept secret, last February, the journalist Fanny Agostini, former weather presenter of BFMTV-RMC passed by Thalassa, revealed to be at the origin of this complaint. The facts would have taken place in Corsica in October 2013. Jean-Jacques Bourdin would have “tried to kiss her several times“, without “achieve it“. The young woman would have struggled and would then have been confronted with a “threat from someone who had a hierarchical ascendancy“since his colleague would have told him that he”Always gets what he wants“. For months, he would have sent her insistent emails and SMS, enough to arouse real fear for her, until his departure from the group in 2017.
In mid-February, a second woman had filed a complaint for sexual assault, harassment and sexual exhibition, accusing Jean-Jacques Bourdin of events that occurred in the late 1980s. The investigation was closed in April due to prescription of the facts, the time limit in this respect being six years.
For his part, the accused, supported by his wife Anne Nivat, formally denies the accusations. “I denounce the public manipulation of this procedure and deplore the serious attacks that have been made on my personal life and my professional life.“, he said then.
Remember that Jean-Jacques Bourdin remains presumed innocent of the facts of which he is accused until the trial.