The Nanterre public prosecutor’s office announced in a press release on Monday that it had reopened an investigation targeting Patrick Bruel after the dismissal of a rape complaint in November 2022.
This complaint was filed in 2021 for facts reported dating back to 2015 involving the 67-year-old singer and actor, who is the subject of three other investigations in France and one in Belgium for sexual violence.
The complainant, Ophélie Fajfer, who was 19 years old at the time of the facts, said her lawyer, Me Myriam Guedj Benayoun, on Monday on BFMTV.
The rape she denounces allegedly took place in Patrick Bruel’s vacation spot in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in Provence, where Ophélie Fajfer, then a young composer, had gone hoping to obtain professional advice from the singer, whom she met on the set of a video for Les Enfoirés.
Sexual assault or exhibition
The Nanterre public prosecutor’s office also indicated that a complaint with civil action for rape and sexual assault was filed Tuesday by two victims with the dean of the investigating judges of the Nanterre judicial court.
It “follows a first investigation closed without further action (…) on December 22, 2020 on the grounds that the offenses reported appeared insufficiently characterized,” specified the public prosecutor.
Five women indicated, as part of this procedure, that they had suffered “an inappropriate attitude or gestures during massages performed during concerts between 2008 and 2019,” added the prosecution, indicating that the facts denounced are qualified as assault or sexual exhibition in criminal law.
Two other women reported rapes in 2000 and 2010, according to the same source.
In addition to the reopened procedure, the Nanterre public prosecutor’s office is already seized of three rape investigations implicating Patrick Bruel for acts which allegedly took place in 1997, 2000 and 2008.
All investigations are carried out by the first judicial police district of the Paris police headquarters.
A judicial investigation was also opened in Belgium after a complaint registered at the end of March for an alleged sexual assault in Brussels.
In a publication on Instagram on Sunday, Patrick Bruel claimed to have “never forced a woman”, “drugged, manipulated or sought to subjugate anyone” and denied having “never used (his) notoriety to abuse anyone and obtain non-consensual relationships”.
