Sex tape sinks Macron ally’s mayoral bid
A sex scandal has ended the campaign of a Paris mayoral candidate, an unusual episode in a country with a reputation for shrugging over extramarital affairs and the private lives of its politicians.
Benjamin Griveaux announced yesterday that he was ending his campaign after the circulation of an undated video apparently depicting him masturbating – footage the politician allegedly recorded on his phone and sent to a woman who was not his wife.
His departure shakes up the Paris mayoralty race. With only a month to go before the vote, President Emmanuel Macron’s party now does not have a candidate.
But the bigger question on people’s minds was why he bowed out, and why he did it so quickly.
Griveaux, 41, the French government’s former spokesman, cited an attack on his privacy and his family. He is married with two children.
Russian anti-state performance artist Petr Pavlensky claimed credit for releasing the video, although it remains unclear how he obtained it. He said his motivation was fighting political hypocrisy.
‘‘He’s someone who is constantly leaning on family values, who says that he wants to be the mayor of families, and always cites his wife and children as an example. But in fact [he] does just the opposite,’’ Pavlensky said.
But sex is not scandalous in French politics in the way it can be in Britain and in the United States.
President Francois Mitterrand had an entire second family, while Jacques Chirac had multiple mistresses. Nicolas Sarkozy met and married a supermodel, and Francois Hollande left his journalist companion to have an affair with a leading French actress – prompting his ex to write a tell-all book about their relationship. But there has never been a French version of something like the Monica Lewinsky scandal, not even when Mitterrand’s second family showed up at his funeral in 1996.
In Paris, there were hardly any calls for Griveaux to withdraw. A number of Griveaux’s opponents and politicians from other parties rallied to his defence.
The city’s Socialist mayor, Anne Hidalgo, who is running for reelection, called for ‘‘the respect of private life and of people’’. Far left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon – no friend of Macron’s party – called the attack ‘‘odious’’. Mediapart, an investigative news outlet, said it turned Pavlensky away when he approached it earlier this week.
‘‘These messages and videos are nothing more than a clear invasion of privacy or revenge porn,’’ Mediapart wrote. ‘‘In both cases, it’s a criminal offence.’’
Alexis Corbiere, a far-left member of the French parliament, decried what he called ‘‘this Americanisation of political life, where people will apologise because they have lovers, mistresses, etc’’.