Since she announced that she had filed a rape complaint against Patrick Bruel, via her Instagram account, on Friday, Flavie Flament had not spoken. It is now done, in a long video interview of more than 20 minutes posted online this Monday by Mediapart. “16 is the age of the first emotions, not the age of rape in a Parisian apartment,” she summarizes.
The host detailed her memories of that day in 1991, when she was a teenager. And added that the singer, fifteen years later, would have slipped into her ear what was a confession for her.
The rape she claims to have suffered took place, according to her account, in the Parisian home of the actor, who was then just over 30 years old, after a photo shoot.
The one who would have set his sights on the teenager offers her tea. She doesn’t usually drink it, but accepts. She is impressed, he gave her the impression of counting, of having importance, to her who describes herself as a high school student from Normandy, she says. She drinks, then nothing until she wakes up.
“I am an object”
“But I have an extremely precise memory of the moment when I come out of this state, when I open my eyes. And there I see him, we are on his bed, and he is putting my pants back on. And my thoughts are extremely powerful, they are astonishingly vivid. On the other hand, my body does not respond, there is a delay, so it is an immense fear. And I absolutely don’t understand anything that happened to me at that time. But above all, I am realizing that he is getting dressed, that he is buttoning my pants, and that he is on his own business. That’s terrible. (…) I am an object,” she explains to Mediapart.
Flavie Flament also said she was “stunned” by the defense of the singer, who through one of his lawyers said he had an “episodic relationship” with her. She claims to have been forced to receive him several times on her shows, but otherwise to have “never maintained a relationship, whatever it may be, with Patrick Bruel”.
The French presenter finally recounts a brief exchange which took place in September 2006, the first time that she found herself alone for a moment with Bruel, behind the scenes of a show.
“In a corridor, he walks towards me, very very confident, with this look. He takes me in his arms and I hear in my ear: “do you remember?” What, she replies. “Well, we slept together,” he would have retorted.
For Flavie Flament, since she has no memory of a sexual relationship, it is therefore clear that she was abused. “I had my answer, I was raped,” she concludes.
Patrick Bruel, targeted by several complaints, reaffirmed Sunday on his Instagram account that he “never forced” a woman into sexual relations. On Flavie Flament, he assured that their “brief story” was “neither violent, nor coerced, nor sneaky”, adding that “there was neither rape nor drugs”.
