“These new testimonies make me deeply angry”reacts Tuesday, September 20 on franceinfo Cécile Delarue, journalist and member of the group of complainants in the PPDA case.
>> TESTIMONY. PPDA case: “This impunity takes me out of my hinges”, testifies the writer Bénédicte Martin
New complaints for sexual assault and rape have been filed against Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, and new testimonies published in Liberation. She regrets that so many accusations have not changed anything for the former presenter, “He can still move freely without any problem”whereas “90 women” are now part of the group of plaintiffs. Cécile Delarue also believes that “prescription should not prevent prosecution”.
franceinfo: How did you react to reading these new testimonies?
Cecile Delarue: It’s a lot of emotion and always anger. It is the emotion to see these faces again on the front page of this great national daily, to recognize the face of a person who is already part of our collective, Margot Cauquil-Gleizes, and to discover a new face, that of Bénédicte Martin. And especially to read these testimonies, to discover what she could hear when she tried to speak, it made me deeply angry. We’ve all been trying to talk for years, we’ve been talking about it for years, talking about it around us. Personally, it’s been more than a year and a half since I filed a complaint. And we are still at the same result for the moment.
Does this accumulation add to your incomprehension and anger?
Yes, I hear that justice takes time, I hear that most facts are prescribed, but we are all faced with an inability to see what will happen to us. We are waiting for the trial, perhaps, around the complaint of Florence Porcel, the first to have filed a complaint. We believe in it, we hope that something will happen, but for the moment this man who is accused by many women – we are at 90 names on our list of testimonies, women who recount assaults and rapes – and he can still circulate freely in France without having any problem. What our whole history shows is that seriality exists, and that limitation should not prevent prosecution.
The prescription and the filing without follow-up of certain complaints seems today to push certain women to testify in spite of everything rather than to give up, does that surprise you?
It’s almost easier to file a complaint when it’s prescribed. We can end up with a story that is very hard, that we have hidden, that we have not been able to tell for so long. And we can more easily tell the police or the gendarmes because we know that behind it we will not have to assume it yet, because it is so impossible to be able to prove a rape. The most difficult thing is for all these women who are not prescribed and who do not file a complaint. All these women who are afraid, because we know there are some, all these women who hear us, who hear this story, who see the front page of Liberation, in whom it awakens billions of things , and who say to themselves “I should file a complaint but I can’t”. Because they are too afraid, because there is too much pressure, media, politics, there are too many issues behind this complaint.
How can everyone be better informed?
Participate in the consultation initiated as part of the European project De facto on the Make.org platform. Franceinfo is the partner