For nearly a decade, a man at the heart of France’s cultural administration allegedly used his position of power to drug women during job interviews, exposing them to a humiliating and deeply confusing form of abuse. Christian Nègre, a former civil servant at France’s culture ministry, is accused of lacing the coffee or tea of nearly 250 women with a powerful diuretic between 2009 and 2018. Many of these women were young professionals hopeful for a career in public service, meeting a senior official for what should have been a routine conversation about employment. Instead, Nègre allegedly engineered what he described as “walking interviews,” taking women out of their offices and away from toilet facilities, so that the drug could take its natural, degrading effect. According to investigators, he documented these encounters in disturbing detail, including taking secret photographs of women during their interviews, and keeping a spreadsheet on his computer titled “Experiments P,” where he apparently recorded details such as the time the diuretic was administered, the underwear his victims were wearing, and how long the effects took to begin. The abuse continued until 2018, when a colleague finally caught him photographing a female staff member’s legs from under a table. That was the moment that his world, and the lives of the women who had begun to quietly suspect something wrong, finally spilled. Nègre, who is now in his sixties, was suspended from his role as regional director of cultural affairs, dismissed in 2019, and remains under a formal investigation into allegations including drugging, invasion of privacy, and sexual assault. His lawyer, Vanessa Stein, has said he will not comment while the investigation continues.
The human reality behind this painful count of accusations is best understood through individual stories. Anaïs de Vos remembers her interview in 2011 as a turning point in her life, though she did not fully understand why until years later. She was 27 years old when she met Nègre for a job at the Ministry of Culture in Paris. It was normal, she said, to accept a drink during an interview would be fine, and although she rarely drank coffee, she agreed out of politeness. The coffee tasted bad, but she drank about half of the cup in her nervousness. Shortly afterward, Nègre suggested that they go for a walk together, a gesture which must have seemed open and relaxed. But as they strolled through the streets, de Vos felt a sudden and overwhelming need to urinate, along with an unsettling physical weakness that made her feel disconnected from her own body. “I was really weak. I couldn’t really feel my legs anymore. I was scared. I didn’t know what was happening,” she told the BBC. She was too uncomfortable to tell a senior official she needed a bathroom, so she tried to signal that she was cold and wanted to go back to the building. He continued walking, leading her toward the Louvre, where she hoped there would be facilities. But instead, he stopped and looked her directly in the eye. “Oh, do you need a wee?” he asked, and in the moment she recognised something odd in his expression. “I thought it was really weird the way he looked at me, almost gleeful,” she remembers. Then he pointed to the door of a storage cupboard next to the River Seine and said: “You can do it here.” She eventually managed to find a café that allowed her to use the toilets, but by then the diuretic had moved through her system with such force that she lost control and passed urine in her clothes. She was dressed in a dress that helped disguise what happened, but she felt dizzy, drained, embarrassed, and no closer to getting the position she had originally hoped for. She would not understand for many years what exactly had been done to her.
The same pattern ruined other women’s sense of dignity, sometimes for years. Marie-Hélène Brice met Nègre in 2017 for an interview in Strasbourg, another post connected to France’s Ministry of Culture, and she trusted him as a senior advisor. He told her that she looked stressed, and suggested they go for a walk to calm her nerves. It sounded spirit of humanity. Within minutes, however, she felt a bodily urgent need that grew almost unbearable. “I was really starting to suffer… pains to the point that I was white, pale, I had tears streaming down my face,” she recalled. Nègre was leading her through an area where he claimed there was a toilet, but when they arrived, there was none. She had nowhere to go. Eventually she lost control and urinated while he was present. He offered her his jacket, seemingly protective, but she later remembered that he did not take his eyes off her. Her shame was immediate and profound, and it stayed with her long after they returned to the Ministry building. She was terribly embarrassed and ashamed, feelings familiar to women who have experienced any act of secret or humiliating wrongdoing. She could not make sense of what happened, and because she had accepted his invitation, because she had drunk a coffee, because she had allowed him to take her for a walk, she blamed herself in guilt. It took years for her to understand that what had happened was no accident, no failure of her body, and no momentary stress response. She was one of many women who were manipulated systematically for reasons that appear to have been entirely and almost grotesquely personal. The details of their experiences give clearer and clearer understanding that she was another entry in a spreadsheet, another experiment, another person whose modesty and self-respect had been deliberately placed under threat.
The investigation into Nègre has revealed deeply disorienting evidence about the scope of his alleged behavior. After being reported to the authorities by the public official who caught him in 2018, police discovered that his computer contained what appears to be a detailed record of a decade of this practice. The spreadsheet, which was labeled “Experiments P,” contained the names of the women he interviewed, the timeline of the drug administration, and intimate notes about what they were wearing. The fact that he took photographs as well suggests that the abuse wasn’t just about the power or the physical effect, but also about watching women lose their physical autonomy, about controlling them as objects in some strange private state of his own. Nèg is said to have taken the women without whom a medical context, sometimes at different locations around Paris and other cities, sensitive to their need for a toilet. In some cases, he may have picked women for one reason or another, hiding behind the polite bureaucratic style. The case is now being developed under the concept of “chemical submission,” a term that has become more familiar to the public recently after the trial of Gisèle Pelicot’s husband, who drugged her for years and allowed strangers to assault her. Although the details of that case are different, the underlying use of substances to deprive a victim of physical autonomy and freedom of choice connects the cases in the public imagination and illustrates the gravity of what Nèg is accused of. As a senior civil servant, Nég had access, trust, position of authority, and perhaps a way of appearing respectable to officials, to women who had no reason to suspect that a public official was capable of such a pattern of degradation.
As the legal process moves painfully slowly, the women have begun to speak out in a unified voice, demanding that France take their allegations seriously. For many of them, these experiences were not just a drink that tasted strange and a walk that was too long, but something close to sexual assault: a violation of the most personal boundary of the body, designed to humiliate and objectify. Through the Fondation des Femmes, they have highlighted the length of the case, which continues without resolution for seven years. They want to know why Nègre had not been put on trial earlier. They question how he was still employed, even for a time, in human resources after the allegations and conviction. The women have looked for official acknowledgment from the French government, and the state’s silence has been painful. In their view, it suggests that their experience still does not have the same weight as perhaps an attack with more physical violence. They are calling for structural changes that would make it harder for similar incidents to happen in the future, and they remind the public that the abuse of power in supposedly professional spaces is not always a visible aggressive attack. Sometimes it is a friendly cup of coffee, a smile, a well-tailored suit, and a suggestion to go for a walk. The women did everything right: they complied with a senior official in a job interview; they did not want to make a fuss; they trusted that he would not deliberately harm them. The idea that someone would use a medical drug and office procedures to cause them to wet themselves, while photographing and recording their reactions, seems so improbable that they had no category to process it at the time. That is exactly why such patterns can remain hidden for years.
The deeper story is about how easy it is to use power when, as a culture, we expect women to remain pleasant, helpful, and uncomplaining. The women in Nèg’s story are not simply victims of a single malicious man; they are also victims of a world that tells women that they are responsible for avoiding discomfort, for managing the reactions of others, and for not causing awkwardness, even when something feels wrong. Anaïs de Vos drank a coffee she did not want because she was being polite to an interview official. Marie-Hélène Brice agreed to a walk because it was offered by an authority figure. When their bodies began to fail, they tried to hide, suppress, and find a way out silently rather than make the situation discomforting. This is an emotional accountability that protects people like N and leaves other people to struggle with fear, embarrassment, and doubt. It is important now that the women have come forward and that the details of the spreadsheet, the photographs, and the repeated technique have been made. Names and faces behind the numbers matter. They remind us that we should describe their experiences not as strange or shameful, but as a measure of the abuse of institutional power. While we wait for the trial, we can at least recognize what has been done to them: a public servant and a person who was supposed to be the defender of the rights of citizens chose instead to devour the trust of human beings who came to him with hope. There is something uniquely horrible about using the ordinary act of hiring and job-seeking as a way to hurt people. That hope, that vulnerability, and that need for employment are, for a predator, just another kind of doorway. The women who are watching this official process reminds us that shame belongs to him, not to them. Their courage in speaking now deserves the final word, and they will not let themselves be silent any longer.
