The prosecutor requested eighteen months of suspended imprisonment against the former leader of the Montaigne Institute, a figure of the circles of power, whose trial underlined the addiction to cocaine.
by Raphaëlle Bacqué
Laurent Bigorgne resigned from the Montaigne Institute, which he directed, and from National Education, where he has long been a professor. He who sailed with ease in the circles of power no longer has a job. His formerly impressive “networks”? “This environment quickly cut the ties and friends that have left on the fingers of one hand,” he said before the Paris Criminal Court who judges him, Thursday, November 10, for having drugged Sophie Conrad, his ex-Belle sister and former collaborator at the Montaigne Institute. He also seems to be a little hesitant between defending himself with this brio of yesteryear who made him present reform projects to the presidents, the big bosses and the ministers, and the need to act of contrition before the court.
From the start, he apologized to the young woman who, seated 2 meters from him at the Paris court, did not take a look. He also immediately recognized his addiction to cocaine, which gradually led him to all drifts. “I took up to 4 grams per day, not for a worldly, but performative use,” he said, detailing his overactivity at the head of this think tank, dispensing for all governments.
Laurent Bigorgne has more difficulty, however, to explain why, on February 22, during a dinner where he had invited her to his house, he discreetly slipped into the champagne cup of Sophie Conrad three MDMA crystals , this drug sometimes assimilated to the “rapist drugs”, before she managed to flee from his home. Although the Paris prosecutor’s office has dismissed this track and that she declared that evening to the police that he had not sketched any physical gesture against her, for her victim, there is no doubt: “Her intention was, Alas, sexual, and to violate me, “she said to the court.
” built on a lie “
For months, he bombed her with texts that the president of the court read at length, intermingling the projects on the professional future of the young woman to repeated and displaced questions about her celibacy and her sexuality. Twice already, during previous meetings, he offered her cocaine, which she refused. Sophie Conrad, however, swept these alerts: she has known her since she was 11 years old. At the time, Laurent Bigorgne had married his sister, whom he divorced more than twenty years ago. She does not want “ambiguous relationships”, she once slipped, but she understood, she said, that “her drug is her work, and cocaine, her instrument to be able to hold”.
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