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A French court has found a former senator guilty of drugging a female lawmaker with ecstasy with intent to sexually assault her.
Joël Guerriau, 68, was sentenced to four years in prison on Tuesday, of which 18 months must be behind bars.
The high-profile trial of the former senator comes months after France was stunned by a case that saw Frenchman Dominique Pelicot jailed for 20 years for repeatedly drugging his then-wife so he and dozens of strangers could rape her.
National Assembly MP Sandrine Josso said shortly after Tuesday’s verdict that it was a “huge relief”. Guerriau’s lawyers said he would appeal.
French prosecutors had sought a four-year prison sentence for the former senator, who described the drugging of his friend of 10 years in November 2023 as an accident and called himself an “idiot”.
Guerriau, who has denied any sexual motivation against Josso, resigned from the upper house in October. He was expelled from the centre-right Horizons party soon after.
On Monday, a visibly distressed Josso, 50, said she thought she would die after going to see Guerriau at his apartment in the French capital’s chic 6th district.
She told the Paris court that she had gone to see Guerriau “with a light heart to celebrate his re-election. As the evening went on, I discovered an attacker.”
She was the only guest at his Paris home that evening, and after he poured her a glass of champagne in the kitchen, she noted it tasted sweet and sticky.
“I thought maybe it was a bad champagne. Then he insisted that we toast again. I found that odd,” she said in court.
Josso described soon feeling unwell with a racing heartrate, and she left hurriedly before going to hospital.
A toxicology report revealed a high dose of the drug in her blood. Ecstasy was also found at Guerriau’s flat.
Her lawyer, Arnaud Godefroy, said the lawmaker has struggled with the consequences of what had happened to her.
Godefroy said Josso had taken six months off work, during she had “physical treatment, psychological and psychiatric follow-up, nightmares, flashbacks, dissociation”.
Josso said she had to have four teeth removed because of the stress that caused her to grind her teeth.
Guerriau said he had poured the powdered ecstasy into a glass the day prior to their celebration to help calm a panic attack, but then decided against taking it, placing the glass back in the cupboard.
“In short, I am an idiot,” he concluded.
Earlier Tuesday, prosecutor Benjamin Coulon argued that Guerriau “deliberately placed” MDMA in Josso’s champagne and requested a five-year ban from public office.
He also demanded that the former senator be placed on the sex offender register, in addition to the jail term.
Guerriau, who served as a senator from 2011 to 2025, had voted for the law creating the offence of administering a harmful substance with intent to commit rape or sexual assault, Coulon said.
The prosecutor stressed that, as an elected official, Guerriau was duty-bound to “set an example”.
But he also said that Guerriau had no criminal record and had “devoted part of his life to the functioning of French democracy”.
The centrist politician “did not act on his intentions, it is true, no gestures were made towards Ms Josso, but he did administer drugs to her with the aim of raping her”, argued Coulon.
If he drugged her, he said ironically, was it “to steal her wallet?”
One of the politician’s lawyers, Henri Carpentier, said that as soon as the case came to light, “the emotion was unanimous, the disgust legitimate”.
“Emotion is a bad adviser, it erases all nuance,” he warned.
France last year adopted the principle of consent into the definition of the crime of rape, after other European countries like the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.
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In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
