French investigators have opened five new probes into rape allegations against former prime-time news presenter Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, prosecutors said Wednesday.
The 76-year-old has denied repeated accusations of rape or sexual assault. In December he was charged with the rape of writer Florence Porcel in 2009.
That probe was widened in February to look into claims of the rape of two more women and a sexual assault of another committed between 2007 and 2018, which could lead to fresh charges.
The new investigations are into accusations of rape during an earlier period, the prosecutor’s office in the Paris suburb of Nanterre and a lawyer told AFP.
The five accusers had filed previous complaints that had been rejected for being past the statute of limitations, a source at the prosecutor’s office said. Their lawyer used a different legal channel to get the investigations opened.
Poivre d’Arvor’s lawyer was not immediately available for comment.
Amongst the five accusers, journalist Helene Devynck has alleged the television presenter raped her when she was his assistant in 1993.
Another journalist, Stephanie Khayat, has accused him of two rapes in 1994 and 1997.
Marie-Laure Eude-Delattre claims Poivre d’Arvor raped her as a 23-year-old intern at the Cannes Film Festival in 1985.
Margot Cauquil-Gleizes, now a teacher, said he raped her the same year when she was 17.
All four were identified by their lawyer Corinne Herrmann. It was not immediately clear who the fifth person was.
Devynck told AFP she felt a sense of “great victory that the judiciary was finally considering” their cases.
Khayat said she was “relieved” and hoped it would lead to a “serious inquiry”.
– ‘Cascade of cases’ –
After a preliminary inquiry opened in 2021, prosecutors dropped 19 out of 22 testimonies or legal complaints accusing the veteran presenter of rape, sexual assault or sexual harassment for being past the statute of limitations.
But the five plaintiffs have used another legal channel to obtain investigations.
Herrmann argued the cases were “not past the statute of limitations because there are several of them.
“When you have a cascade of cases, the latest annuls the statute of limitations for the one before it,” she said.
She added that she had also petitioned for an investigation unit specialised in serial crime and cold cases to take over the investigations, as the accusations pointed to a “series” of crimes in the 1980s and 1990s.
France is reeling from a series of accusations of abuse in the arts and journalism.
Screen icon Gerard Depardieu, 75, is to stand trial in October over accusations of sexually assaulting two women. He was also charged in 2020 with rape two years earlier. He denies all the charges.
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