A court in France on Tuesday night convicted former Sen. Joël Guerriau of drugging fellow lawmaker Sandrine Josso with the intent to sexually assault her. The court sentenced him to four years in prison, of which he will serve 18 months behind bars. Guerriau was also ordered to pay Josso 5,000 euros in compensation for emotional harm.
Guerriau’s two-day trial drew widespread media attention in France against the backdrop of a series of sexual assault cases that have rocked the country in recent years, most notably the case of Gisèle Pelicot, whose husband drugged her for a decade and recruited 72 strangers to rape her without her knowledge. Pelicot became an international feminist symbol after choosing to testify publicly, under her full name and without anonymity, about the mass rapes.
Guerriau, 68, served as a member of the French Senate, parliament’s upper house, representing the center-right Horizons party. First elected in 2011, he resigned in October last year after charges were filed against him. The assault took place in November 2023, when Sandrine Josso, a member of the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, from the centrist MoDem party, came to his Paris apartment to celebrate his recent election victory. The court found that while the two were alone in the apartment, Guerriau slipped the synthetic drug MDMA, also known as ecstasy, into a glass of champagne he served her.
Guerriau did not deny that Josso drank from a glass containing ecstasy, but claimed it was a mistake. He said he had put the drug in the glass the day before, allegedly intending to take it himself, then changed his mind and returned the glass to a shelf. According to his account, he mistakenly served that same glass to Josso the following evening. “In short, I’m an idiot,” he told the court. “I am disgusted with myself, with my recklessness and my stupidity.” Prosecutors rejected the claim that it was an accident, and the court ruled that Guerriau drugged Josso with malicious intent to sexually assault her. His lawyers said they will appeal the conviction.
Josso, 50, said after the verdict that it was “a huge relief” for her. A close friend of Guerriau for a decade, she testified that she came to his home “in a good spirit” to celebrate his 2023 election victory. “I came to visit a friend and discovered an attacker,” she said. She told the court she was the only guest and noticed that after Guerriau poured her a glass of champagne in the kitchen, it tasted sweet and sticky. “I thought maybe it was spoiled champagne. Then he insisted on raising another toast. I thought that was strange.” Josso said she soon began to feel unwell and her heart raced. “He was watching me the whole time. I had never seen him like that,” she testified. “I didn’t want to show him my weakness, because I was afraid that if I said I wasn’t feeling well, he would force me to sleep with him.”
She described how she eventually managed to leave the apartment and went straight to a hospital, where tests found a high level of MDMA in her blood, three times the usual dose. Investigators later found the drug in Guerriau’s home. Josso’s lawyer, Arnaud Godfrin, told the court that the attack caused her severe trauma. “Six months away from work, medical treatment, psychological and psychiatric follow-up, nightmares, flashbacks and dissociation,” he said. Josso testified that four of her teeth were extracted because the extreme stress she experienced caused her to grind them. “What I went through was very painful,” she told French media before the trial. “Psychological trauma feels like being frozen in time. I startled at the smallest thing. I became extremely sensitive.”
Josso, who remains a member of parliament, is active in efforts to combat sexual assault. She has joined a new French advocacy group fighting what is known as “chemical submission,” the practice of drugging victims in order to sexually assault them. The organization was founded by Caroline Darian, the daughter of Gisèle Pelicot. Josso attended hearings in the trial of Pelicot’s husband, Dominique Pelicot, and Darian attended the proceedings in Guerriau’s trial.
During the trial, the prosecutor noted that as a senator, Guerriau himself voted in favor of a law criminalizing the drugging of victims for sexual assault and said he should “set an example.” Prosecutor Benjamin Colot dismissed Guerriau’s claim that it was merely an unfortunate mistake. “He did not carry out his intentions, that is true. There were no gestures toward Ms. Josso,” Colot said. “But he made her ingest the drug with the intention of raping her.” He added sarcastically: “Was he planning to steal her wallet?”