JUSTICE – Prosecuted for acts of sexual abuse, the former columnist of Canal + Pierre Ménès, who repeatedly mentions his health concerns, spoke this Wednesday, June 8, after the dismissal (announced a few hours earlier) of his trial by the Paris Criminal Court on March 8, 2023. He denies the charges against him.

At the end of the PSG-Nantes match on November 20 in Paris, a hostess at the Parc des Princes had reported to the police “touching” in the chest and stomach, without filing a complaint. However, an investigation was opened the same day by the Paris prosecutor’s office. Pierre Ménès had filed a complaint for slanderous denunciation.

“I have no version of the facts, since I have never approached this woman, from near or far”, affirms Pierre Ménès who denounces “a pure invention” in an interview granted to the Parisian. The ex-figure of Canal+, who describes himself as “the ideal culprit”, believes that “with everything that fell on me […] to go fiddling with a girl’s breast in the second half of a match […] you still have to be the king of the irresponsible or the king of the obsessed”.

“There is not a witness”

Asked about the accusations of sexual assault against two women in a store of a famous sports brand in Paris in June 2018, Pierre Ménès again disputes the facts with which he is accused. “So I did what basketball players do, chest to chest, in a kind of ‘check’, he explains. This is called sexual assault.” He denies having “perhaps a hit” the first accuser by accident “for lack of space”, sneaking towards the checkouts of the store.

Accused of having touched the buttocks of the second woman, he castigates the change of version of the complainant, denouncing a “wobbly testimony”: “When she came into confrontation at the police station of the VIIIth, it was no longer the buttocks, it had become the lower back.”

During the interview, Pierre Ménès was also questioned about the accusations of sexual assault against Isabelle Moreau, Francesca Antoniotti and Marie Portolano. “For Isabelle and Francesca, I cannot dispute: it is on TV”, seems to recognize the ex-star columnist of the Channel Football Club, who was forced to leave the channel on July 1, 2021, before claiming that it was Isabelle Moreau who kissed him. As for Francesca Antoniotti, he describes the facts as “bullshit” made “to mess around”.

While journalist Marie Portolano, behind the documentary Ji am not a slut, accuses him of sexual abuse, Pierre Ménès says he does not remember anything (he had already delivered this version of the facts) and assures “that there is not a witness”. “I’m not saying that I didn’t do it, I’m saying that I don’t remember, and that I was too sick, assures the sports journalist who remembers not having “stayed at the end of the ’emission”.

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