Sex Scandal Griveaux
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Sex Scandal Griveaux
Opinion | Anatomy of a Parisian Sex Scandal
There’s a big difference between knowing that your politicians cheat and seeing their sexts.
PARIS — Like everyone else in France, when I heard that Benjamin Griveaux was quitting the Paris mayor’s race because someone released his sex tape online, I immediately searched for the tape.
When I couldn’t find it, a friend warily agreed to send me a link. It was a video selfie of a man masturbating. You could hear him breathing but you couldn’t see his face.
I watched it, then wrote back, “I understand why people have sex in the dark.”
But what I didn’t understand, at first, was why Mr. Griveaux had dropped out of the mayoral race — whose first round is March 15. The tape was humiliating, but he hadn’t broken any laws. Plenty of French politicians have survived sex scandals. He was behind in the polls, but losing seemed preferable to giving up.
I’m not alone in wondering what happened. Mr. Griveaux, 42, was part of the group of young, hyper-educated upstarts who helped President Emmanuel Macron found a new political party that would transform France into “la start-up nation.”
In the weeks since he left the race, the country has plunged into a national drama that’s part soap opera, part psychoanalysis. Are the French becoming like Americans, who punish public officials for private sins? How did the attention-seeking Russian artist who released the tape manage to disrupt a French election? Who’s the alluring 29-year-old woman at the center of the scandal, who seems to have bedded both the Russian and Mr. Griveaux?
To answer these questions, magazines here have run soul-searching features on everything from possible Kremlin involvement (there’s no proof of this) to the meaning of masturbation . They barely have the vocabulary to describe what’s happening: Writers awkwardly describe “enregistrements à caractère sexuel” — recordings of a sexual nature — or use English terms like “revenge porn” and “la sextape.”
The whole narrative scarcely makes sense: The artist, Pyotr Pavlensky , who specializes in political protest stunts like depositing himself naked and wrapped in barbed wire in front of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly (he titled the act “Carcass”), claims he wanted to expose the candidate’s “hypocrisy.” When Mr. Griveaux opened his bid for mayor, he posed for the magazine Paris Match with his pregnant wife, and later announced the baby’s birth on Twitter with the hashtag #happyfamily.
But most French voters didn’t actually think that meant Mr. Griveaux was a strict monogamist, nor were they outraged to discover he wasn’t. The public is fascinated by court gossip (“erections municipales,” one headline joked) but allergic to moralizing. Here, the view has long been that all people — even politicians — were entitled to a walled-off, practically sacred part of their lives that may be full of contradictions.
Breaching that wall is against the law here — Mr. Pavlensky and his girlfriend face two years in prison and a 60,000 euro fine for infringement of privacy and distributing sexual images of someone without their consent. It also seems pointless to “Americanize” French morality when the United States has a president whose supporters shrug off his philandering. And the videos are an existential violation. (One analyst quoted the essayist Henry de Montherlant, who said “ One should never say everything, not even to a stone. ”) Even Mr. Griveaux’s political enemies condemned the way he was brought down.
However smartphones and social media have complicated France’s longstanding norms on sex and politics. It’s one thing to learn that presidents like François Mitterrand had a love child or that Jacques Chirac’s extramarital trysts supposedly lasted “five minutes, shower included.” It’s quite another to click a link and witness a live sexual act.
In the torrid chronology that’s now emerging, it’s clear that social media has driven l’affaire Griveaux from the start. According to French news reports, in May 2018 a 20-something graduate student, Alexandra de Taddeo, began leaving political comments and book suggestions on Instagram for Mr. Griveaux, then spokesman for Mr. Macron’s government.
Mr. Griveaux replied, a flirtation developed, and by the end of the month they were exchanging sexy snapshots and videos via Facebook Messenger. She saved some of them. The two seem to have met in person just once, that August, in Ms. de Taddeo’s Paris apartment. In an interview on French television Sunday, Ms. de Taddeo called their meeting “disappointing”; other accounts say that either she didn’t like him physically, or she found the meeting offensively brief.
Ms. de Taddeo may have seemed like a reasonable risk for a cautious politician: She came from a middle-class French family, and already had master’s degrees in government and law. She went on to do an internship at UNESCO.
What Mr. Griveaux didn’t know was that, according to reports, Ms. de Taddeo had also struck up a correspondence with Mr. Pavlensky, who was granted asylum in France in 2017 and was already in prison for staging a fire at a branch of France’s central bank (he titled this one “Lighting”). Apparently he and Ms. de Taddeo exchanged French erotic poetry and she advised him to read Tocqueville.
It’s unclear whether Mr. Pavlensky urged Ms. de Taddeo to contact Mr. Griveaux. But they became an item soon after the Russian’s release from prison. And last November, Mr. Pavlensky, who speaks halting French, started a French-language website called pornopolitique, which solicited embarrassing material on politicians (“This is our only way out of the swamps of Puritanism and hypocrisy!” a manifesto explained).
For the site, he and Ms. de Taddeo interviewed Cicciolina, the Italian erotic actress turned politician. Ms. de Taddeo recently graced the cover of Paris Match, with red lipstick and windblown hair, as Mr. Pavlensky is handcuffed on the pavement in front of her. (She claims he released the video without her knowledge. On the radio, her parents insisted that she’s no anarchist and that her boyfriend “isn’t our cup of tea.”)
While Mr. Griveaux’s right to record sex videos isn’t at issue, his spectacularly bad judgment in sending them to a stranger is. “Can we imagine General de Gaulle filming his genitals in Super 8?” one commentator asked.
And yet observers also marveled that Mr. Griveaux didn’t just weather the scandal, in the French tradition, especially since the videos soon disappeared from the web. “You can see he’s really a beginner,” said the French comedian Wary Nichen, adding that a more skilled politician would have just said, “What an indignity!” and that the tape “wasn’t me.”
Let’s see what happens next time. Another reason members of the French establishment instantly rose up to condemn the episode may be that they fear falling victim to similar tactics. In a nation where you’re supposed to have secrets, hardly anyone wants to change the rules.
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FILE PHOTO. (L) Benjamin Griveaux attends a news conference in Paris. ©REUTERS / Benoit Tessier; (R) Russian artist Pyotr Pavlensky © REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko
The Paris mayoral candidate picked by President Macron has ended his campaign a month before the election, following a sex scandal. His run was torpedoed by a self-exiled Russian shock artist, who released the compromising tapes.
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Benjamin Griveaux, who ran for the top office in France’s capital with Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche party, announced he was withdrawing his candidacy. He said he decided to pull out of the race to protect himself and his family from further below-the-belt attacks.
“For over a year, my family and I have been subjected to defamatory statements, lies, anonymous attacks, exposure of secret private conversations, as well as death threats,” the 42-year-old married father of three said in a short statement. He added that the publication of sex tapes, which he considered an “ignoble attack” on his private life, was the last straw.
The now ex-candidate would neither confirm nor deny the authenticity of the materials leaked on Tuesday. His announcement comes after an emergency meeting with President Macron on Wednesday and just a month before municipal elections in France, which are scheduled for March 15 and 22. Even before the sex scandal his campaign was floundering, with Griveaux slumping in the polls and projected to take third place in first round of the vote.
French politicians, including Griveaux’s rivals, rallied to express support to the man and dismay over the indignant way that ended his mayoral bid. Cedric Villani, the eccentric mathematician-turned-politician, who split from Macron’s party to run against Griveaux as an independent, said the “outrageous attack” posed “a serious threat for our democracy.”
Left-wing ex-presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon said a politician’s life should not fall victim to voyeurism while a spokesman for the right-wing National Rally party said nobody expected people running for public offices to be saints.
The attack that put an end to Griveaux’s run was launched by Pyotr Pavlensky, a controversial Russian artist who has been living in France since 2017 after claiming he had to flee his home country due to political persecution. He accused Griveaux of being a hypocrite, running on a platform of family values while privately considering marriage a “prison” and sending intimate pictures to young women.
The accusations were backed by what were claimed to be conversations between the politician and an unidentified female, complete with sexually explicit images. There is no evidence that Griveaux was actually involved. Pavlensky claimed he obtained the materials from an unnamed source, who had a relationship with the politician.
Pavlensky gained international notoriety thanks to a series of politically charged performances in Russia, which involved harming himself. During his big debut in 2012 he sewed his mouth shut in a gesture of support for fellow anti-government activists Pussy Riot. Another performance involved him getting naked and nailing his scrotum to the pavement of the Red Square.
The artist fled Russia after he and his partner were accused of sexually assaulting a woman, an allegation that he insisted was a fabrication. The French authorities granted him political asylum – but were less welcoming of his political performances.
In October 2017 he set the doors to the Bank of France on fire to protest against “tyranny” and encourage a new revolution. He was arrested and spent more than a year in pre-trial detention before being sentenced to three years suspended and a fine, which he reportedly proclaimed he would never pay.
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