Skip to content
Later, it was Francesca Gee, another of his victims, whose story is told in “Drunk on lost wine”, who denounced similar facts in the press.Since then, Gabriel Matzneff, who is the target of an investigation for “rape of minors” and is summoned to appear in 2021 before a criminal court for apologizing for the crime of aggravated rape, lives out of sight and the media. The demonstrators wanted Mr. Girard gone for his longstanding support of the pedophile writer Starting at age 15, when they met in Tunisia, Mr. Girard engaged him in a decade-long abusive relationship that left lasting psychological scars, Mr. Hmaïd told The New York Times, making his story public for the first time.He asserts that Mr. Girard sexually abused him when he was 16, and then over the following years coerced him for sex on about 20 occasions.In return, Mr. Hmaïd says, Mr. Girard employed him occasionally as a houseboy at his summer home in southern France and gave him temporary jobs at the Yves Saint Laurent design house, where Mr. Girard was a top executive before entering politics.“He took advantage of my youth, of my young age and everything for his sexual pleasures,” Mr. Hmaïd said from his home near Paris. Thursday evening, when he had just been reappointed to his post of Deputy Culture of the City of Paris, Christophe Girard finally announced his resignation, after being targeted by a demonstration organized by elected environmentalists and activists feminists. He said he did not understand why Mr. Hmaïd would accuse him of sexual abuse, questioning why he had waited decades to come forward and saying he was inventing stories to capitalize on the Matzneff affair in search of a book deal.“There’s an entire novel there — he’s certainly going to be able to find an editor,” Mr. Girard said.Told that four people had confirmed hearing of the abuse from Mr. Hmaïd two decades ago, Mr. Girard said, “You can lie to four people.”After the trip to the United States, the teenager worked as a houseboy for Mr. Girard. Hmaïd said the older man asked him to accompany him twice to a hammam, or bathhouse, which he did. Mr. Matzneff, 84, was also Mr. Matzneff’s case has set off a broad reckoning over sex, gender and power in France, which has only intensified with Mr. Girard’s resignation. / LP / Delphine Goldsztejn My parents encouraged me to see him. They “have encouraged and supported these behaviors, (and) thus place themselves outside the municipal majority”, judges the mayor of Paris.Tensions that were also felt this Friday at the Paris Council. Mr. Girard abruptly resigned last month as deputy mayor of Paris.Mr. He admitted to “having taken care” of Gabriel Matzneff’s hotel room at the request of Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent’s companion. 0. Girard immediately offered him a dream job: Mind two of his young sons on a monthlong trip to the United States.Dozens of photos from the trip show Mr. Hmaïd in the company of Mr. Girard, the two boys and friends — at Disney World, the Statue of Liberty, in front of the White House and on the beach at Fire Island in New York.At hotels, while the boys slept in their own room, Mr. Girard insisted that Mr. Hmaïd share a bed in his room to cut down on costs, Mr. Hmaïd recalled. These cookies do not store any personal information.Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. “It ruined my life, in fact. But his mother, who died a couple of years after her son’s revelations, had dissuaded him.It was not only his record as deputy of culture in Paris for 13 years that brought Mr. Girard power.Even as he served in government, Mr. Girard was a longtime top executive at LVMH, the luxury goods empire, raising questions of conflict of interest.He oversaw a cultural budget of $500 million, including the allocation of $100 million in That was, until the Matzneff scandal, when some members of the Green Party — a governing partner of Mayor Hidalgo’s Socialists — stated their opposition to him.To Alice Coffin, a newly elected Green councilor, Mr. Girard embodied an establishment “ensconced for years in an exercise of power that prevents them from questioning themselves.”Mr. But Mr. Hmaïd said he met Mr. Bergé only once and barely spoke to him.As for the photos, Mr. Girard said they were taken while Mr. Hmaïd was in his employment and that the nude one was not taken after a sexual encounter together, as Mr. Hmaïd claims.In the archives, there was also a souvenir of a trip they took to Orlando, Fla: a ticket stub dated July 29, 1990, to Disney World.Aniss Hmaïd was 15 in the summer of 1989 in Hammamet, a Tunisian resort town where the French socialized in their whitewashed villas and at luxury hotels with names like Sinbad and Aladdin.His parents had emigrated to France years earlier. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. Girard said he did not remember how Mr. Hmaïd obtained the jobs at Yves Saint Laurent, adding that they were perhaps through Pierre Bergé, the co-founder of the design house who died in 2017 and who had been “fond” of Mr. Hmaïd. Mr. Girard said that he met the father, or talked to him by phone, but that he could not remember details.At the end of the summer, the adolescent was told by his parents to join them in France.In Paris a few months later, his mother handed him Mr. Girard’s phone number.“‘Call him,’” she told her son.