Anger of the PPDA lawyer against the journalist Hélène Devynck who accuses the journalist of rape: “She will answer for it before a judge like all these false victims!”

In the book “Impunity” which will be published at the end of the week, the journalist Hélène Devynck who accuses, like many other women, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor of having raped her, develops her perception of “the construction of impunity”.

In this book, which appears on Friday from Editions du Seuil, Hélène Devynck, 55, tells in the first person the past year in the “PPDA” affair, one of the most emblematic of the MeToo movement in France. The journalist and screenwriter writes her story there, but also that of other complainants, having accused the former star presenter of TF1 of rape, sexual assault and / or sexual harassment.

A book that made the defense of Mr. Poivre d’Arvor, presumed innocent, jump. Ms. Devynck “will answer to a judge, like all these false victims,” ​​her lawyer Philippe Naepels told AFP.

The author, already targeted by a complaint for slanderous denunciation after accusing PPDA of having raped her in 1993 when she was his assistant at TF1, seemed to have anticipated this reaction.

“The threat of defamation hangs over my every word,” she wrote in “Impunity.” “I can’t prove that Patrick Poivre d’Arvor raped me. I never could. The facts are prescribed. They will never be judged,” she laments. Her book is intended to be “a letter, a tribute” to the women who have testified, she explains to AFP. He also has an ambition: “to show the fabric in which impunity is woven”.

Hélène Devynck and 22 other women testified during a first investigation, closed without further action in June 2021, mainly for prescription. “The dismissal has demonstrated the banality of impunity,” said the complainant. “We had the impression that we were being thrown in the trash, as if we had not spoken, as if we had done nothing. I wanted to tell this story”, she explains to the AFP.