The former deputy of the Médoc Benoît Simian (La République en Marche then Libertés et territories) was sentenced, Thursday, June 23, to eight months in prison suspended for harassment of his ex-companion with whom he is in the process of divorcing.
“In a few months, the prosecution had identified forty-one acts of harassment against his former companion”, relates France Bleu. He was accused of more than forty malicious acts, “sometimes two or three times a day”, between July and November 2020 at their home in Ludon-Médoc, which he no longer had the enjoyment of since a non-conciliation order.
The former elected official, aged 39, has multiplied the comings and goings to go in particular to an outbuilding of the house transformed into a parliamentary office. He was also accused of having parked several times in front of the home, preventing his wife from going out, of having embarked on gardening and DIY work by cutting laurels or having beams and bags of large rocks or urinating on the lawn. He was also suspected of having bathed in the pool, before emptying it, through the hole in a cat flap. “It appears that these repeated acts were done with the intention of behaving as if he were still at home and to annoy” his wife, said the court in its judgment.
Another harassment investigation
Given these facts of harassment “perfectly constituted” the Bordeaux Criminal Court also issued a new one-year contact ban, but did not follow the prosecution, which had requested, in addition to the suspended prison sentence, a three-year ineligibility sentence. The court did not retain this additional sentence, considering that “the acts were not committed within the framework of his parliamentary activity”. Mr. Simian will also have to pay 5,000 euros in non-pecuniary damage and 1,200 euros in legal fees. He has ten days to appeal. In addition to this file, Mr. Simian is accused by an employee of having forced her to sleep in the same room as him and of having multiplied the intimate messages between the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. The Bordeaux prosecutor’s office opened a investigation.
Candidate for re-election in the 5e constituency of the Gironde without having been invested by the presidential majority, the dissident deputy was curtly eliminated in the first round of the legislative elections, collecting only 3.68% of the votes.