A tête-à-tête between elected officials of the Republic, a champagne with a strange taste, and a resounding political-judicial affair: ex-senator Joël Guerriau is on trial Monday and Tuesday before the Paris Criminal Court, accused of having drugged MP Sandrine Josso with ecstasy in order to rape her.
In this affair, often perceived as an emblematic case of chemical submission, a scourge of society to which Sandrine Josso has been very politically involved since the facts, the possible sexual motivation, denied by Joël Guerriau, should be the subject of fierce debate at the hearing.
On the evening of November 14, 2023, Sandrine Josso, 48, was invited to the Parisian home of the 56-year-old senator from Loire-Atlantique, a parliamentary counterpart with whom she has had a friendly relationship for ten years without the slightest sexual ambiguity. He wants to celebrate his fresh re-election to the upper house, in which he has sat since 2011.
When she arrived around 8 p.m. in her apartment in the 6th arrondissement, the MoDem MP discovered to her great surprise that she was Joël Guerriau’s only guest. While she waits in the living room, her host prepares glasses of champagne for them in the kitchen, out of sight.
Sandrine Josso accepts the glass offered to her, takes a few sips. In the mouth, white champagne has a funny taste.
According to the MP for Loire-Atlantique, Joël Guerriau is strangely pressing. He reproaches her for not eating or drinking, insists on serving her again, toasting her. The senator performs “magic tricks” in front of his guest, plays with the lighting in the room by switching the ceiling light off then on again.
After a glass and a half of champagne, accompanied by two fajitas, Sandrine Josso experiences “bizarre” symptoms: heart palpitations, hot or cold flashes, nausea, tremors… Seeing Joël Guerriau handling a transparent bag and putting it away in a kitchen drawer, she panics.
Pretending to have to return to the National Assembly, the MP, in great distress, having difficulty even speaking or standing, quickly left Joël Guerriau’s home around 10 p.m. and asked fellow MPs to come pick her up from the Bourbon Palace.
Transported to hospital, toxicological analyzes revealed severe ecstasy intoxication of her body, with the presence of MDMA at 388 nanograms per milliliter of blood. A concentration very much higher than a recreational intake of this euphoric drug.
“Act of inadvertence”
Arrested the day after the events, Joël Guerriau denies having drugged Sandrine Josso to attack her and argues that it was an “act of inadvertence” on his part.
According to the account he provided throughout the investigation, he obtained a euphoric for himself during a period of mental distress following the death of his cat, and by mistake served his friend a drink that he intended for himself.
During a search, a 30-gram sachet of ecstasy was found in his kitchen drawer.
“I’m not in top form. I seem to be doing well but inside, I am devastated,” Sandrine Josso told AFP ahead of the trial. “Somehow, I take it as a mission actually. I say to myself, if this happened to me, if I found the energy necessary to escape, I must do something with it.
For his part, Joël Guerriau “reserves his explanations for the court,” his lawyers, Maria Roumiantseva and Henri Carpentier, told AFP. The former senator, who resigned on October 5 from the Luxembourg Palace, faces five years of imprisonment.
Sandrine Josso considers that by drugging her, Joël Guerriau intended to rape her to “satisfy an impulse, a fantasy”, which the defendant denies.
If the senator did not make any gesture of a sexual nature during the evening, the investigating judges considered that the “at least intimate setting” of the tête-à-tête and his research on the internet, a few weeks before the facts, on drugs and rape were sufficient for him to be tried on this charge before the court.
