Excluded for a year and without pay. A CNRS research director in Strasbourg was given a one-year exclusion, accompanied by a six-month reprieve, for “sexual harassment” of two doctoral students and an intern, we learned this Saturday from of the institution. It is “deprivation of remuneration”, it was specified.
The facts had been reported to the CNRS in June 2022 by two women who had started their theses “under his co-direction”, triggering the opening of a joint CNRS / INSERM investigation, indicates the notification. Seconded to the Inserm unit “Basic and applied research interface in cancerology”, the research director was excluded “from the notification of this decision”, dated February 27 and which AFP was able to consult.
Inappropriate gestures towards three women
This 1st class research director, in office since 2013, had been suspended in November and then heard by the joint administrative commission (CAP) in February 2023. Among the inappropriate gestures mentioned by the internal investigation: hand “on the buttocks”, ” on the thigh, on the neck, caresses on the hair and the shoulders”, without the consent of the three women.
According to the internal investigation, the researcher had towards his two doctoral students and an intern “under his responsibility”, between 2015 and 2022, “inappropriate behavior consisting of inappropriate gestures with a sexual connotation and compliments on the physique putting them in trouble. ‘comfortable,’ the notification continues. “By this behavior, (he) placed (the three women) in an intimidating, humiliating and offensive situation which led one of the two doctoral students to wish to end her thesis”, according to the same source.
A “tactile behavior”?
During a trip abroad, he would have “lying on (a) doctoral student asleep on her back at the beach” while they were “both in bathing suits”, according to the notification. He would also have “presented himself in his underwear” in front of the intern. If he recognizes “generally having a tactile behavior”, he denies “any sexual connotation to his gestures”, indicates the notification.
The three women filed a complaint, it was indicated to the CNRS which “strongly condemns all forms of discrimination and harassment, behavior and acts of a sexist and sexual nature” and recalls having set up “a report-cell” in February 2022.