“I want the courts to hear me like any other citizen,” Abad said in a statement on Wednesday, May 17, referring to his support for the decision to lift his immunity.
The National Assembly unanimously decided to lift the parliamentary immunity of former MP and Minister Damian Abad today, Wednesday, due to rape-related charges.
The submission of this request to waive immunity comes as part of the ongoing preliminary investigation in the French capital, Paris. Based on the decision, the accused deputy may be taken into police custody.
“I want the courts to hear me like any other citizen,” Abad said in a statement on Wednesday, May 17, referring to his support for the decision to lift his immunity.
Abad, the former leader of the Republic’s deputies, was appointed in May 2022 as Minister of Solidarity, Autonomy and Persons with Disabilities.
But the day after his appointment, Mediapart reported the testimony of two women who accused the minister of rape in 2010 and 2011. The first woman, a Young Democrat activist, claimed she suffered a “disrespectful and insistent” sexual relationship that she tried to end after she consented to it in January 2011.
She filed a complaint twice, but it was rejected in 2012 and 2017 due to the “lack of the complainant” and then “for the lack of a sufficiently serious violation.”
As for the second woman who testified to the French site, she said that Abad drugged her in the fall of 2010 when she met him in a bar. She explained that she woke up the next morning “in a hotel room near the pub in her underwear,” describing her condition as “shocking and disgusting.”
At the end of June 2022, the complaint was filed again by a third woman accusing Abad of attempting to rape her during a party organized at his home in Paris in 2010. In her testimony, she said that the then member of the European Parliament tried to force her to perform oral sex.
After the publication of these latest accusations and the filing of a complaint, the Paris prosecutor’s office opened an investigation into “attempted rape”.
For his part, Damian Abad denies all the accusations against him, saying that “sexual relations were based on the principle of mutual consent” and that it was “physically impossible for him to commit the acts described” due to a rare congenital neuromuscular disease he suffers from, which is arthritis.
