Sex Scandal Griveaux

Sex Scandal Griveaux
February 22, 2020 7:00 am (Updated July 10, 2020 3:29 pm)
As sex scandals go, the one that hit Benjamin Griveaux last week was especially juicy. Mr Griveaux, 41, French President Emmanuel Macron’s choice for Paris mayor , and family-values advocate, got the wrong sort of exposure ahead of the poll. A video emerged of him masturbating in footage recorded on his phone and sent to a woman who was not his wife. Caught in flagrante, Mr Griveaux, the French government’s former spokesman, promptly ended his mayoral election campaign.
The episode – dubbed ‘Masturgate’ – was met with howls of outrage across France. And yet the indignation was less about the lurid video, and more about the supposed entrapment of Mr Griveaux, and the ‘Americanisation’ of French politics. Renowned for shrugging over extramarital affairs, the French fretted about succumbing to the same prurience and puritanism about personal lives that afflicts other countries. Does this incident call into question the hallowed French tradition of discretion over bedroom dalliances?
Most French presidents have been involved in affairs but have benefited from the unwritten rule that their sex lives are private. As far back as 1899, Félix Faure died in flagrante delicto with his mistress at the Elysée Palace. François Mitterrand successfully hid his lovechild from the public for years. While in office, François Hollande was photographed astride a scooter visiting his lover at her Paris apartment.
In 2011, this insouciance was dropped when former IMF chief and presidential contender Dominique Strauss Kahn was accused of sexual assault by a New York hotel maid – but mainly because his case involved criminal allegations rather than mere gossip.
Mr Griveaux himself cited an attack on his privacy and his family for bowing out. “No one should be subjected to such violence,” he said. He is married with two children.
The story behind the video is itself sensational. Russian performance artist Petr Pavlensky claimed credit for releasing it, saying it was sent to his girlfriend. Both now face charges of invasion of privacy and publishing images of a sexual nature without consent. Mr Pavlensky is a notorious figure who made headlines in 2013 when he nailed his scrotum to paving stones in Red Square. He said his motivation was fighting political hypocrisy. “Griveaux is someone who is constantly leaning on family values,” Mr Pavlensky said. “But in fact, he does just the opposite.”
Yet the incident triggered a burst of sympathy for Mr Griveaux, with support from across the political spectrum. Indeed, there were hardly any calls for him to withdraw. The main gripes were about the assault on the Gallic attitude to sex.
“I do not like this Americanisation of political life in which politicians come and apologise because they have a mistress, we don’t care,” said Alexis Corbiere from the radical left-wing party France Insoumise (France Unbowed). Sébastien Chenu, from Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party, raged that “The Americanization of political life is detestable.” Cedric Villani, who had left Mr Macron’s En Marche party after it chose Mr Griveaux as its mayoral candidate, said, “The outrageous attack on him is a serious threat to our democracy.” And the current Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, running for re-election, called for the “respect of privacy”, adding, “This is not worthy of the democratic debate we should be having.”
However, the traditional French discretion over personal affairs is coming under threat. Where once politicians could count on a code of silence from the press in hushing up their amours, the rise of Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms has undermined this journalisme de reverence, or journalistic complicity.
There is now a renewed public debate over whether journalists should be enabling politicians to enjoy the so-called cinq à sept, the term for their trysts between 5pm and 7pm. Although the #MeToo movement has had less purchase in France than the United States or Britain , it is has spurred some to ask whether powerful men are using the cult of privacy to abuse their power over others in a criminal fashion.
Barthelemy Courmont, research director at the IRIS think tank, says there is a slow Americanisation of the political scene, with more emphasis progressively put on morality. “A form of puritanism similar to that of the US is emerging in the country of Laclos and Voltaire,” he says.
Other , though, suggest that – vive la difference! – the US and Britain are moving more in the direction of France. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and US President Donald Trump were both elected despite many allegations of extra-marital affairs, indicating that voters no longer believe so strongly that their politicians should be held to a higher moral standard.
“You can’t always generalise about the French being more easy-going,” says Oxford scholar Theodore Zeldin, author of a five-volume History of French Passions . “This is rather a sign of the viciousness and hatred that has entered politics, and not just France. It is the age of the trolls – you find what can hurt your opponents.”
That could mean France’s indulgence of infidelity may be tested less for moral reasons, and more for the embarrassment factor. If so, then the French may have to be a lot more careful with their ooh la las.
All rights reserved. © 2021 Associated Newspapers Limited.

Opinion | Anatomy of a Parisian Sex Scandal
Give this article Give this article Give this article
Give this article Give this article Give this article
There’s a big difference between knowing that your politicians cheat and seeing their sexts.
As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.
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.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com .
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram .

PUTIN UP WITH IT Russian troops forced to pay £570 for OWN armour and equipment says MoD
MINE HORROR At least 28 killed and dozens trapped as massive blast tears through coal mine
'FULL OF LOVE' Tributes to 'beautiful' London mum found dead in a bag on Peru dream holiday
OPEN TO HATE Shamima may be 'welcomed back' after first ISIS bride allowed to return to UK
THE French president's closest lieutenant has been exposed for sending an obscene video to a young woman he was "sexting".
President Emmanuel Macron’s government was today plunged into a sex scandal amid the revelations after Benjamin Griveaux, 42, withdrew his candidacy to become Mayor of Paris.
Married dad-of-two Benjamin Griveaux stepped down in response to the film of him pleasuring himself as X-rated messages between the senior politician and woman were also revealed.
The explicit messages were published alongside extracts from the politician’s interviews and speeches about his support for family values.
Griveaux and wife Julia Minkowski have given a number of interviews bragging about his wish to be a "mayor for children and parents".
In October, he said: "When I told my wife that I intended to embark on the Parisian campaign, it was obviously with her support, otherwise it would not be possible.
"I love her very much. I would not do what I do if wasn’t there."

President Macron had backed Griveaux throughout his campaign to become mayor.
But the head of state was today "deeply disappointed" by what had happened, said a presidential aide.
Mr Griveaux - a former government spokesman and leading figure in Mr Macron’s Republic on the Move (LREM) party - said: "I have decided to withdraw my candidacy from Paris municipal elections.
"This decision will cost me, but my priorities are very clear – they are first of all my family."
Speaking of the video, he added: "A new stage was crossed yesterday.
"A website relayed ignoble attacks endangering my private life.
"I do not want to expose us further, my family and I, when anything goes, it goes too far."
Griveaux’s allies blamed the release of the footage to "anonymous enemies, possibly including the Russians".
The intimate video that appeared online contains mobile phone footage, and numerous details about Griveaux’s private life.
Man Utd star Mason Greenwood arrested for 'breaching bail for GBH and rape'
Charlotte Crosby gives birth to first baby as her dad shares exciting news
Never-seen-before moment O'Sullivan sobs after winning seventh world title
I'm a mum at 45 to triplets and their grandma, thanks to my daughter
©News Group Newspapers Limited in England No. 679215 Registered office: 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF. "The Sun", "Sun", "Sun Online" are registered trademarks or trade names of News Group Newspapers Limited. This service is provided on News Group Newspapers' Limited's Standard Terms and Conditions in accordance with our Privacy & Cookie Policy . To inquire about a licence to reproduce material, visit our Syndication site. View our online Press Pack. For other inquiries, Contact Us . To see all content on The Sun, please use the Site Map. The Sun website is regulated by the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO)
Our journalists strive for accuracy but on occasion we make mistakes. For further details of our complaints policy and to make a complaint please click this link: thesun.co.uk/editorial-complaints/

2. Did you encounter any technical issues?

Video player was slow to load content

Video content never loaded

Ad froze or did not finish loading

Video content did not start after ad

Audio on ad was too loud

Other issues

Ad never loaded

Ad prevented/slowed the page from loading

Content moved around while ad loaded

Beauty Heels Porn
Teen Hair 18 Sex
Plump Hentai Tits

Sex Scandal Griveaux

Report Page