“I was 14 and I let it go (…). I was 14, I knew and said nothing.”
My stepfather was supposed to come into my brother’s room. I heard his footsteps in the hallway and knew he was coming to him. In this silence I imagined things. That he asked my brother to maybe pet him, to suck him.
“I waited. I waited for him to come out of the room, full of unknown and immediately despised smells,” wrote the book’s author, 45-year-old lawyer Camille Kouchner. “By not naming what happened, I took part in the incest.”
More than a month after its publication, Kouchner’s book, “La familia grande”, continues to turn France on its head.
In it, Kouchner accuses her stepfather, leading French intellectual Olivier Duhamel, of abusing her twin from the age of fourteen.
The twins are the children of the former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.
Their stepfather, Duhamel, is a socialist former Member of the European Parliament and a renowned political expert who also headed the board of Sciences Po, one of France’s foremost universities.
“I am subject to personal attacks and in an attempt to maintain the settings in which I work, I am terminating my functions,” Duhamel wrote on Twitter on Jan. 4, shortly after the allegations surfaced. The tweet coincided with his departure from Sciences Po’s board of directors and leaving roles in an intellectual club and a political science publication.
Duhamel has since deleted the tweet and his Twitter account.
On January 5, the Paris prosecutor’s office announced that it would open an investigation into Duhamel for “rape and sexual assault by a person with custody of a 15-year-old minor,” despite the statute of limitations.
CNN has contacted Duhamel’s attorney but has received no response. The political scientist has not spoken in public since his resignation.
Duhamel’s stepson – the twin brother of Camille’s Kouchner – also filed a complaint against Duhamel last month, according to a statement from his attorney Jacqueline Laffont, obtained by CNN and initially sent to AFP news agency.
“ In the context of the ‘Duhamel case’, the alleged victim informed the AFP through his lawyer, Jacqueline Laffont, that he had filed a complaint against his ex-stepfather, Mr Olivier Duhamel, following the opening of a preliminary investigation by the Paris prosecutor’s office, ”the statement read.
Top university shaken
The consequences of the Duhamel case are felt far beyond his family circle.
Sciences Po director Frederic Mion resigned Tuesday in a letter to professors and students published on the university’s website.
The university is one of the most elite schools in France and has produced five French Prime Ministers and five French Presidents, including current leader Emmanuel Macron.
For the past month, Mion has been under pressure to resign from student groups after acknowledging that he had been made aware of the allegations against Duhamel as early as 2018.
In his letter of resignation, Mion referred to a Department of Education report on his handling of the case, admitting that he had “ made an error of judgment in handling the allegations communicated to me in 2018, as well as inconsistencies in the way I expressed this myself about this matter after it was broken. “
In a statement released Jan. 7, Mion responded to an article published the day before in the Le Monde newspaper, claiming that he was aware of the allegations, although he had initially denied them.
“With no tangible evidence, nor any further or precise knowledge of the situation, I had trouble believing the rumors to be valid,” Mion wrote in the statement. He said discovering through press releases the magnitude of Duhamel’s alleged actions was “a shock to me personally.”
But on Wednesday, in an email to CNN, former Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti – once a colleague of Mion at Sciences Po – said Mion had called her when the revelations surrounding Duhamel surfaced a month ago, allegedly telling her: We shouldn’t let anyone think we knew. “
CNN has contacted Mion but has not received a response.
Mion is just one of the many members of the French elite affected by the Duhamel scandal.
Jean Veil, a prominent lawyer and longtime friend of Duhamel, admitted to Le Monde newspaper that he had known about the incest for “at least 10 years”, invoking “professional secrecy” to explain his silence.
Camille Kouchner criticized in her book what she regards as the silence of the French intelligentsia.
“Very soon, the microcosm of people in power, Saint-Germain-des-Prés [a fancy neighborhood on the Left Bank that has long been associated with the French intellectual elite] was informed. A lot of people knew, and most of them pretended nothing had happened, ”she wrote.
Victims come forward
Beyond the elite of the country it came from, the Duhamel scandal has led to a national bill of incest in France, with hundreds of alleged victims highlighted on social media under the hashtag #MetooInceste. The French used Twitter to share poignant stories of child abuse by parents and family members and how that trauma – and the accompanying sense of shame and isolation – often persisted well into adulthood.
Feminist thinker and activist Caroline De Haas, one of the initiators of #MeTooIncest, told CNN, “We wanted to show that incest is a political, collective issue.”
She explained that the #MeTooIncest movement was born of a will to shift from the individual story of the Kouchner twins to a collective history of incest.
French lawyers are also seeing an increase in the number of victims coming forward to share their stories. Child protection attorney Marie Grimaud told France Inter Radio on Tuesday that “we received many phone calls for three weeks from women who realized they needed to speak up, meet with a lawyer and file a complaint.” In addition to the victims themselves, Grimaud said her office had been contacted by people “on behalf of a sibling or niece” who they believe “may be in danger”.
Facing Incest has long advocated changing the law to better protect minors against sexual abuse within the family. With the Duhamel scandal making headlines in the French media for over a month, the government has seized the issue.
Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti told France 2 public broadcaster on Tuesday that the government intended to consider any penetrating sexual relationship with a child under the age of 15 as rape.
Treating a sexual relationship with a minor under the age of 15 as a serious crime – rather than a minor crime with a lighter sentence – currently requires evidence of coercion, violence, threat or surprise.
“The issue of the victim’s consent will not be raised again. We will not doubt whether the victim agreed or not,” junior minister for Children and Families Adrien Taquet told Europe 1 on Tuesday if they were under 15.
In France, incest is legally defined as sexual intercourse between two people related to a degree that prohibits marriage. In addition to direct family ties, the prohibition also includes relatives by marriage – so, for example, divorced persons cannot marry a child or parent of their ex-spouse. The civil code does not prohibit marriage between cousins.
Aside from that, incest is not illegal as long as the relationship is freely agreed between people over 15, the age of sexual consent in the country. While rape is prohibited regardless of who the perpetrator is, sexual crimes committed by a family member or “a person who has custody of the victim” are more severely punished.
Facing Incest said on its Twitter account that the government’s proposals on the age of consent were “elusive” and expressed the hope that MPs would bring more clarity as they work on the bill.
De Haas told CNN that the current debates surrounding the bill “bothered” her because of their focus on repressive legislation. “What is needed is a public policy of training and prevention,” she said.
Reflecting on the broader impact of the Duhamel scandal on French society, De Haas said the case had brought incest to the forefront of public debate and made it a high-profile political issue.
“That’s thanks to the legacy of #MeToo,” she said, noting that the movement raised awareness that sexual violence was not an isolated act, but a social and political phenomenon.
Barbara Wojazer and Antonella Francini in Paris and Niamh Kennedy in Dublin contributed to this story.