The metropolitan council of Saint-Etienne promises to be stormy once again this Thursday afternoon for Gaël Perdriau, mayor and president of the metropolis. “Terribly hurt” by revelations from Mediapart about an intimate video blackmail affair, the 50-year-old elected hopes to convince the assembly to “trust justice” when several members of the metropolitan council have called on him to resign. “The metropolitan council is not a court, the councilors are not judges, nothing has changed since the last metropolitan council” at the end of September, he wanted to sweep Wednesday in an interview with AFP and the Progress.
“Today nothing prevents the proper functioning of the institutions… The work proceeds normally, in spite of all the attacks of which I am the object. No file is blocked, ”he assured. “There is a majority of the majority who support me, very clearly.” At the same time, the ex-LR admits to being “in an extremely difficult situation”: “today there is a supposed victim with a version of the facts which has been watered down in the media and I who am the supposed culprit, with (…) elected officials who no doubt have an interest and a certain number of media who have already rendered their judgment”.
“I have never blackmailed Gilles Artigues”
Gaël Perdriau is at the heart of a judicial investigation into the filming and use of a sexual video in which we can see his former centrist first deputy Gilles Artigues being massaged by a man in a hotel room , at the end of 2014. Namely accused by Gilles Artigues, placed in police custody in mid-September, quoted in damning audio recordings, the mayor of Saint-Etienne has always claimed his innocence.
“I have never blackmailed Gilles Artigues. To get what? To this day, moreover, I still do not know the motive, it has never been advanced in the accusation”, he affirmed, recalling having supported his ex-deputy “in all the elections in which he wished to be a candidate”. “He lost them all (…) and therefore it is certain that he no longer had any influence and that I did not need that”. “This story is much more complex than it seems and if some and others could have been shocked by what they read and heard, the sequel promises to be just as shocking”, a-t- he launched Wednesday, repeating to be “neither the sponsor, nor the organizer, nor a user of this video”.
A conflict with Laurent Wauquiez
However, he admits having mentioned these images once, during a tense exchange with his deputy in November 2017 about “his secret meetings” with Laurent Wauquiez, LR president of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. According to him, the articles published by Mediapart “are a brick of a political logic” intended to destroy it.
“I am suffering a relentlessness with shared political interests, my lawyer transmitted to the judge a very clear testimony (…) which shows that the publication of the mediapart articles is part of a much older political logic involving Gilles Artigues and people extremely close to Laurent Wauquiez on the political level, ”he said in this interview with AFP and Progrès.
The mayor dates the start of his troubles to 2016 when he took a stand in favor of Bruno Le Maire in the LR primaries, which Laurent Wauquiez took “like a declaration of war”. “With Laurent Wauquiez, it’s not complicated, if you don’t show allegiance you become a target and I’m not the only one to say so,” he says. His criticism of the line adopted by LR in the 2022 presidential election had cost him the vice-presidency of the party in the spring.
Elected in 2014, renewed in 2020, he claims to receive “a lot of testimonies of support” from the inhabitants of the city, in the face of this “unfair political and media surge”. “That’s why I’m hurt: I put all my energy, all my guts, all my life for Saint-Étienne”, he proclaims “Everything I read about myself today, this is not me I am not this man that we describe, that we dirty “and” the mayors of the metropolis know very well that I do not behave like that “, he assures.