A Paris appeals court on Tuesday confirmed the release of the rape case against Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, although the accuser said she would continue to fight to be heard.
Chief prosecutor Remy Heitz said the court had confirmed the dismissal of the case, stemming from a 2017 complaint by Sophie Patterson-Spatz that Darmanin was raped in 2009.
The verdict is a boost for Darmanin, 40, a high-flying young figure to the right of President Emmanuel Macron’s center-right government who often talks about fighting illegal immigration and crime.
“For the fifth time in almost six years, the justice system has found that there is no wrongdoing for Gerald Darmanin,” said lawyers Pierre-Olivier Sur and Mathias Chichportich, adding that the minister “will not comment further”.
“There’s a surprise,” Patterson-Spatz’s lawyer Elodie Tuaillon-Hibon said on Twitter, adding that her client will take the case to France’s top court, the Court of Cassation, and the European Court of Human Rights if they fail there.
Patterson-Spatz and her lawyer said Darmanin extorted sex from the plaintiff in exchange for intervening in the case against him while working in the legal service of the conservative party UMP – since renamed to the Republic.
Darmanin admitted having sex with Patterson-Spatz, but said it was consensual.
In 2021, an investigating judge said the case should be dismissed, finding that Patterson-Spatz’s “sincerity … cannot be doubted” but that she “deliberately chose to have sex with (Darmanin) in the hope of having her criminal case retried”.
“The law cannot be mixed with morality,” the judge added, saying the plaintiff “agreed in the eyes of the law”.
A second rape investigation against Darmanin, on suspicion of extorting sex from a woman in exchange for work and an apartment, was dismissed in 2018.
In his position since July 2020, Darmanin has worked on relations with the police and also played an important role in negotiations with his British partner who wants to limit the crossing of small ships in the Straits.