Paris Left Bank intelligentsia face accusations of keeping quiet about open secret of alleged sexual abuse
Credit: STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP
Paris prosecutors on Tuesday launched a probe into allegations that Olivier Duhamel, one of France’s best-known political scientists and commentators, raped and sexually abused his stepson.
Camille Kouchner — the alleged victim’s twin — made the accusations of “incest” in a book out this week called La Familia grande in which she says her stepfather raped her brother over a two-year period in the 1980s when he was as young as 13.
Mr Duhamel, a leading constitutional expert, resigned from his academic and media posts after extracts of the book were published in L’Obs magazine and Le Monde on Monday.
In what constitutes a bombshell for Parisian media and Left-wing political circles, Ms Kouchner, 45, said family and friends knew of the alleged abuse of her twin Antoine, who she calls “Victor” in the book, but observed an unhealthy “omertà” about the open secret for years.
“My book recounts just how many people were aware,” she told Le Nouvel Observateur website L’Obs.
"Very quickly, the people in power, Saint-Germain-des-Pres (the traditional Paris Left-bank fiefdom of leftist thinkers) were aware. Many knew and most acted as if nothing had happened."
On Tuesday, the Paris prosecutor, Rémy Heitz, said he had launched an investigation into “rape and sexual abuse by a person with authority over a 15-year old minor”.
However, there is no apparent possibility of charges being brought as the accusations are beyond the legal statutes of limitation.
Paris prosecutors have launched a probe into rape and sexual abuse of a minor by a person in authority
Credit: JOEL SAGET/AFP
Mr Duhamel, 70, has resigned from his job at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, which oversees and finances the prestigious Sciences Po grande école, and deleted his Twitter account, but has made no comment on the allegations.
Ms Kouchner and her twin are the children of Bernard Kouchner, a former health and foreign affairs minister and the founder of the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières, and Evelyne Pisier, a historian and writer, who died in 2017.
Mr Kouchner and Ms Pisier had three children, Julien and the twins Camille and Antoine, before separating in 1980. Afterwards Pisier had a four-year affair with the Cuban leader Fidel Castro before marrying Mr Duhamel.
However, when the twins revealed the alleged abuse “in their thirties”, their mother preferred to protect her husband, as did family friends, to “avoid a scandal”. She says her brother pleaded with her to keep quiet, telling her: “If you speak, I will die. I’m too ashamed. Help me tell him no, please.”
He finally changed his mind when his stepfather wrote an op-ed piece in Libération in 2012 denouncing journalists who had criticised disgraced ex-presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss-Kahn and praising his ex-wife Anne Sinclair for “remaining silently by her husband for better and for worse”.
“My mother had no doubt re-read the text,” said Ms Kouchner. “My brother picked up the phone and told me: ‘How dare he?’”
Camille Kouchner accuses her mother of refusing to speak out about alleged abuse by her husband on his stepson
Credit: JEAN-PIERRE MULLER/ AFP
Her brother declined to comment other than to confirm to Le Monde that he stood by everything his sister wrote.
“I was 14 and I let it happen … I was 14 and I knew and I said nothing,” Ms Kouchner writes. “Why does he have the right to live outside this reality when it haunts me.”
“Of course I thought my life could be seen as offensive because my family is so well known, then I told myself, that’s exactly why I have to do this.”
She added: “This book is born of a necessity: to bear witness to incest, to show that it went on for years and that it is very, very difficult to break the silence. I did not write it in the name of my brother, but for the sisters, the nieces, all those affected by incest. The omertà in a family weights on everyone.”
Her father, Bernard Kouchner, issued a statement through his lawyer. “A heavy secret that has weighed on us for so long has been lifted. I admire the courage of my daughter, Camille,” he wrote.
Mr Duhamel, a former MEP, is also president of Le Siècle, an influential men’s club whose members include leading French economic, political, cultural and media figures.
A friend of France’s former Socialist president François Hollande, he is the son of Jacques Duhamel, who was a minister under president Georges Pompidou.
Long accused of an unhealthy reluctance to break longstanding taboos over the abuse of minors, France has seen a string of controversies in recent years.
In a book released in January 2020, publisher Vanessa Springora accused prize-winning writer Gabriel Matzneff of abusing her while she was a minor. Film star Adele Haenel in November 2019 accused director Christophe Ruggia of sexually harassing her when she was in her early teens. Both men have denied any wrongdoing.
Ms Haenel and other French actresses also in February last year walked out of France’s Cesar awards after filmmaker Roman Polanski — wanted in the US for the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in 1977 — won best director.
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