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A former French senator has been found guilty of adding ecstasy to an MP’s drink in order to sexually assault him.
Joël Guerriau was sentenced to four years in prison – including 18 months behind bars – and, according to local media, was ordered to pay Sandrine Josso €5,000 (£4,348) in damages for emotional distress.
Guerriau, now 68, had invited Josso, 50, to his Paris apartment in November 2023. He later admitted serving her a drink spiked with MDMA, but maintained it was an accident and denied intending to assault her.
Shortly after Tuesday’s verdict, Josso said it was a “huge relief”, AFP reports. Meanwhile, Guerriau’s lawyers announced he would appeal.
According to court documents cited by French media, Josso said she had gone to Guerrieau’s home three years ago to celebrate his re-election when she started feeling ill after drinking from a glass of champagne.
“I went to visit a friend and I discovered an attacker,” she said Monday during her trial testimony.
“He looked at me intently, I had never seen him that way. I didn’t want to show him my weakness, because I was afraid that if I told him I wasn’t feeling well, he would make me lie down.”
Josso remembers managing to leave the apartment and, with the help of a colleague, went to the hospital where a toxicology report confirmed her blood contained three times the recreational dose of MDMA.
Guerriau told the court he was going through a period of depression and had intended to take the drug himself the night before. He ultimately failed to do so and accidentally gave the MDMA-laced drink to Josso the next evening, he said.
“I’m sorry for Sandrine,” Guerriau told the Paris court. “I am disgusted with myself, with my recklessness and my stupidity.”
He added: “We don’t talk enough about the effects of these drugs… All I want to do is talk about the dangers of these products.”
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Asked about the numerous searches he carried out on the Internet around ecstasy and the drug GHB, he replied that he had no memory of them.
“I was on the train, thoughts and ideas come to you,” he told the court, adding that members of the government must be interested in “all current events”.
Guerriau, a center-right senator from the Horizons party, was suspended when the accusations against him came to light. He resigned as senator last October.
Josso, who is still an MP for the center-right MoDem, has become a fervent campaigner against so-called chemical submission, that is, sexual assault facilitated by drugs.
“What I experienced is still very painful,” Josso said, speaking to French media before the trial began.
“The psychological trauma makes me feel like I’m frozen in time… I jump at the slightest thing. I’ve become very vulnerable.”
Josso then joined an association against chemical submission, created by Caroline Darian, the daughter of Dominique Pelicot, convicted in 2024 of having drugged his wife Gisèle and of having invited men to rape her in their home for more than a decade.
Josso was often present in court during the Pelicot trial. This week, Darian and his brother David attended the proceedings in the Guerriau case.
