Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, symbol of French gallantry? Not really. Already in March 2020, a journalist from German public television WDR, Ann-Kathrin Stracke, 37, lodged a complaint against the former French head of state, accusing him of having put his hand on his buttocks to three times in an interview in his Paris office. It is an older affair that resurfaced on Monday with the publication by the Danish press of extracts from the memoirs of Helle Thorning-Schmidt, former Prime Minister.
She thus relates an incident that occurred in 2002-2003, during a dinner at the French Embassy in Copenhagen. “I saw that Giscard d’Estaing was sitting next to it and he grabbed my thigh under the table. It was completely crazy. I wondered what was going on, I changed places and it was over, ”wrote the former social democratic leader in her book titled Considerations of a blonde which comes out this Monday in bookstores.
“In Denmark, we are not as equal as we thought”
The former French president, who died in December 2020, then chaired the work of the Convention on the draft European Constitution, and Helle Thorning-Schmidt sat on the same Convention. “Today it would have been seen as sexual harassment. This was not the case at the time. It was another time, but I saw it as inappropriate and this situation made me very angry, ”she told local agency Ritzau.
It was well after this incident, which had not been publicized, that the Danish became leader of the Social Democrats from 2005 and then Prime Minister between 2011 and 2015. With her new book, this former director general of Save the Children International from 2016 to 2018 is in the wake of the #Metoo movement, which really took off in the Scandinavian kingdom last year. “In Denmark, we are not as equal as we thought. It made us fall asleep, ”she told Ritzau.