The Paris court renders its judgment on Wednesday concerning the former star columnist of Canal Pierre Ménès, suspected of sexual assault in 2018 and 2021 which he categorically contests.
During the trial on March 8, the prosecutor requested an eight-month suspended prison sentence and a fine of 6,000 euros for “behavior which is criminally reprehensible” and which “corresponds to a kind of abuse of notoriety, of power “.
The 59-year-old sports journalist is first suspected of touching on June 18, 2018, in a Nike store located on the Champs-Élysées, in Paris.
According to a saleswoman who complained, when he arrived that day, she offered to help him choose shoes. “I already have 18 at home”, “I come for the beauty of the saleswomen”, he would have replied, stroking her back “up to the buttocks”.
A second saleswoman explained that he ‘grabbed her hands’ by ‘intertwining his fingers’, that he ‘pressed his chest to (hers)’, then pointed to her breasts, saying: ‘it’s huge’ . She further indicated that he had gone behind her “rubbing his penis against (her) buttocks”.
Pierre Ménès also had to explain himself on other suspicions at half-time of the PSG-Nantes match on November 20, 2021 at the Parc des Princes. That day, a hostess, who did not file a complaint, reported that she was tending to a guest when she felt her chest and stomach briefly touched. “Still frozen”, she explained that she then recognized Pierre Ménès a few steps away.
At the hearing, the defendant claimed not to remember “at all” the first saleswoman and, concerning the second, spoke of a woman who “is almost (her) height. She was in the basketball department and for fun I did a check like basketball players do, torso against torso.
He then invoked the “geography” of the Nike store, saying that he passed near her without sexual intention: “objectively, there was no room”. Regarding the Parc des Princes, he said he had “fallen from the clouds” then having “thought of a set-up”.
The former columnist of the “Canal Football Club” left the company on July 1, 2021, ending almost twelve years of collaboration, after a scandal linked to the broadcast of the documentary “I am a journalist, I am not a slut”. Charges stemming from this documentary are being investigated in Nanterre for sexual assault and sexual harassment.