Dominique Baudis
Dominique Baudis was the French Defender of Rights (ombudsman). Formerly a journalist, politician and Mayor of Toulouse, he was also in charge of The Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (CSA), a French institution whose role is to regulate the various electronic media in France, such as radio and television.
Baudis was implicated in a case related to convicted serial killer Patrice Alègre, involving a sex ring by prominent policemen, judges and other high officials, sado-masochistic sex parties and murders in hotels and an elegant chateau.
The Guardian reported:
L'Express reported that a judicial inquiry in Toulouse, closed to the public, had been told that Mr Baudis, a former TV newsreader, was known as Nénette and had met the killer at a city hotel for sado-masochistic sessions. A former call girl, "Patricia", told magistrates that she had been "offered" to Mr Baudis by Alègre at a Toulouse flat where she underwent three hours of torture that left scars. L'Express says she described Mr Baudis as Alègre's lover.[1]
Contents
Biography
Early life
Dominique Baudis was born in Paris. He was educated at Sciences Po where he graduated in 1968. He is the son of former Mayor of Toulouse (1971-83) Pierre Baudis, an associate of Antoine Pinay of the deep state Le Cercle.
Career
A journalist, he was a foreign correspondent for TF1 in the Middle East from 1976 to 1977. He was news anchor on TF1 from 1977 to 1980 and from 1980 to 1982 on FR3.
A member of the CDS (a member of the centre-right UDF, he was elected to replace his father, Pierre Baudis as mayor of Toulouse in the 1983 French municipal elections. In 1984, he was elected to the European Parliament, in 1986 he became President of the Regional Council of the Midi-Pyrénées, also in 1986 he was elected to the French National Assembly representing Haute-Garonne's 1st constituency. He won re-election in 1988, 1993 and 1997.
He led the UDF-RPR list in the 1994 European election.
In 2001, Jacques Chirac appointed him President of the Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (CSA), a post which he held until 2007, when Chirac appointed him President of the Arab World Institute.
In 2009, the UMP nominated him to lead the UMP list in the South-West for the 2009 European election. His list won 26.89% and he was elected to the European Parliament for a third time.[2]
In July 2009, he was elected Vice-President of the Commission of Foreign Affairs of the European Parliament and in November 2009 he was named rapporteur on the Association Agreement with Syria.
Baudis was nominated by the Prime Minister to the new office of Defender of Rights, essentially an ombudsman role, and was appointed by the Council of State with effect from July 2011.
Serial killer Patrice Alègre
In 2003, while he was president of the CSA, Dominique Baudis was implicated in a case related to serial killer Patrice Alègre and a sex ring of high officials. On May 18, 2003, he publicly revealed this affair in a video interview on TF1. Accused of pimping, rape, murder and barbaric acts, he appeared very tense on the set, his face beaded with sweat. Claiming to be "determined to face slander face to face", this clumsy defense reinforced the rumors of his involvement, relayed by the media.[3]
News24 reported on the case[4][5]:
The affair began, of all days, on April 1, 2003, when the national daily Le Figaro and a regional newspaper published reports that a former Toulouse prostitute had told police investigators that the serial killer Patrice Alegre had received police protection during his crime spree.
One of France's bloodiest killers, Alegre was sentenced to life imprisonment in February 2002 for murdering five women and raping a sixth between 1990 and 1997.
The former prostitute, given the pseudonym of Patricia, had been interrogated by a special police unit, code-named Homicide 31. The unit was established in June 2000 to look into 191 unsolved murders, disappearances and suspicious suicides in the Toulouse region during the time Alegre was active there.
What had astonished police during their investigation of Alegre was that several of the murders of which he was convicted were classified by police as suicides, including one in which the investigator gave as his reason: "A murderer would not leave so many clues."
According to Patricia, at least two highly placed police officials and several judges protected Alegre, who was not only a psychopathic killer, but also the enforcer for a local network of pimps and racketeers with police connections.
In addition, he also organized sadomasochistic parties at a castle owned by the city of Toulouse involving under-age girls and attended by senior officials and judges.
Patricia said that in 1992 she and another prostitute had seen Alegre kill a prostitute in a downtown Toulouse hotel to prevent her from going to the police.
She further alleged that, the same year, Alegre also murdered a transvestite named Claude Martinez to take the videos the latter had made of the perverse parties.
Patricia's testimony was substantiated by another former Toulouse streetwalker.
Shortly thereafter, former Toulouse Mayor Dominique Baudis went on national television to say that the two ex-prostitutes had told investigators that he had attended these parties while he ran city hall.
More incredible, the magazine L'Express revealed, Patricia claimed that Baudis and Alegre had been lovers, and that their trysts took place in the same Toulouse hotel in which the convicted serial killer had killed the prostitute.
What makes Baudis's involvement particularly tantalising is that he is currently head of the French government's powerful media watchdog office, the Superior Audiovisual Council (CSA).
He claimed that he was the victim of an "outrageous frame-up" and suggested that pornographers he had been pursuing in his position as head of the CSA were behind it.
"I have never had any kind of connection, close or distant, with Patrice Alegre, the prostitution milieu or the organisers of those barbaric parties," a visibly upset and heavily perspiring Baudis told the national television audience in mid-May.
Just as a disbelieving French public was digesting this latest twist in the story, Toulouse's highest-ranking magistrate revealed that he too had been implicated in the affair. He was immediately replaced.
At this point another Toulouse transvestite, who calls himself Djamel, confirmed everything and even promised to take police to where the videos of the parties had been stashed.
He also told police that he was the secret son of Michael Jackson and that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had also participated at the sadomasochistic parties.
Djamel was soon arrested for perjury, but the affair continued to take centre stage in the French media - for Alegre, long wrapped in a sphinx-like silence, finally spoke out.
At the beginning of June he wrote a letter to the high-profile presenter of a news programme on the Canal Plus cable television station.
The presenter, Karl Zero, read the letter on air before turning it over to police. In the letter, Alegre said that the testimony of the two former prostitutes was true and declared that he had been ordered to kill Martinez by "two personalities" afraid that the videos would be handed over to police.
One of those "personalities", French media reported, was Dominique Baudis.
Alegre said that he was breaking his public silence because "numerous personalities, supposedly pure as lambs, have expressed themselves at length to claim their innocence. Therefore I also demand my media stage".
Despite its many turns, the scandal seems only just to have begun. With more revelations likely, it threatens not only to destroy the reputation of the entire legal and political system of a major French city, but also to throw its insidious shadow into every corner of France's public life.
Dead witnesses
Baudis was questioned in the presence of the prostitute Patricia, which must have been very intimidating for her. "Eye to eye, all I saw was an evasive look and a lowered gaze," he said. Patricia then went in jail awaiting trial for fabricating accusations.
On July 11, 2005, the investigating chamber of the Toulouse Court of Appeal confirmed the general dismissal in the section "rape and pimping in an organized gang" in which Dominique Baudis and other personalities had been implicated.
December 2005, Florence Khélifi, nicknamed Fanny, 32, was indicted for slanderous denunciation of Dominique Baudis and Marc Bourragué.[6]
September 2006, Christelle Bourre, alias Patricia, was indicted in mid-September for slanderous denunciation against Dominique Baudis.
In 2006, Émilie Espès, the only surviving victim of an assault by Patrice Alègre, "put an end to her life"[7].
On March 27, 2008, the prosecution announced that the ex-prostitutes Patricia and Fanny will be tried in correctional for "slanderous denunciation" against the former mayor of Toulouse Dominique Baudis and the magistrate Jean Volff. After reconsidering their statements, they were found guilty of slanderous denunciation and respectively sentenced to two and three years in prison suspended by the Toulouse Criminal Court on March 26, 2009[8].
Djamel died in September 2009, in a psychiatric hospital in Toulouse, "presumed after a massive absorption of drugs"[9].
The British Daily Telegraph reported in 2003:
Ex-mayor cleared of sex scandal
Claims of murder and sado-masochistic orgies have been dropped, reports Philip Delves Broughton
France's seediest scandal in years unravelled yesterday as a jailed serial killer retracted claims that he murdered a prostitute and a transvestite to keep secret the former mayor of Toulouse's love of sado-masochistic orgies.
The former mayor, Dominique Baudis, who has gone on to become head of France's broadcasting standards authority, was triumphant after the retraction. But it is an extreme embarrassment for the French press, notably Le Monde, which published thinly-sourced articles giving credence to the killer's claims before the police could find evidence to support them. In Toulouse, the defamation of M Baudis was seen as a Parisian plot against a man once regarded as the most successful mayor in France, and one of its most honest politicians. While it might have made amusing gossip in the capital, Toulouse, the city of Concorde, took no pleasure in talk of dungeons, murder and whipping in high places.
"Baudis was never involved in any corruption, any scandals, nothing in his private life," said Mathieu Bixente, 42, a market trader in the square outside the city's grandiose mairie. "So they do this to him instead to drag him down to their level." The fact that the claims of a serial killer, two prostitutes and a transvestite, who said they had seen M Baudis at the orgies, were given more weight than his protestations of innocence has also prompted indignation at France's TV and newspapers.
The anonymous accusations and hysterical speculation reached such a pitch this week that even the serial killer's lawyer called the scandal a "storm in an aquarium of mud". M Baudis was questioned by investigators yesterday for the first time since the scandal broke in April, in the presence of Patricia, a prostitute now in jail awaiting trial for fabricating accusations.
"Eye to eye, all I saw was an evasive look and a lowered gaze," he said. "She came with two policemen and left with two policemen. I arrived a free man and leave a free man. But I will continue to fight against those who have fabricated evidence."
The senior investigating magistrate in Toulouse said he had received a letter from Patrice Alegre, the serial killer who accused M Baudis, in which he retracted his accusations. Later, the transvestite, Djamel, withdrew his claims that he had seen senior officials at orgies.
Alegre, 35, is already serving a life sentence for murdering 10 women and raping two others. But police have continued investigating the unsolved murders of other young women during the 1990s, which they believed might be linked to him. Earlier this year they interviewed two prostitutes, Patricia and Fanny, who told them that he was in fact the pimp for a group of senior local government officials, supposedly explaining why it had taken so long to catch him.
After repeated questioning, Alègre confirmed the prostitutes' claims. He said he organised sex parties at a city-owned mansion just outside Toulouse, providing cocaine, under-age girls and torture devices. Howls emanating from the mansion prompted neighbours to tell police they feared animals were being sacrificed and the prostitutes said three girls were killed during these orgies.
Alègre said that on M Baudis's instructions, he killed a transvestite who had videotaped them, stabbing him 22 times. M Baudis went apoplectic over the claims. Between 1983 and 2001, as mayor of Toulouse, he had transformed it into one of the best-run cities in Europe. He left for his job in Paris with a reputation as effective and honest.
When he heard the accusations, he went on television to deny everything. He accused the pornography industry of wreaking revenge for his attempts to reduce the number of pornographic films shown on television, and blamed the owner of Toulouse's biggest newspaper, La Depeche du Midi, for fuelling the scandal.
M Baudis still has to explain a decade-old police wiretap, revealed in the midst of the scandal, in which a Paris madam discusses his frequent visits to one of her prostitutes. But compared to accusations of sado-masochism and murder, that is everyday stuff for a French politician.[10]
References
- ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/06/france.paulwebster
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20090228050903/http://www.europarl.europa.eu/members/expert/committees/view.do
- ↑ Maxime Tandonnet, Les Parias de la République, Perrin, 2017, p. 133.
- ↑ https://www.news24.com/News24/The-serial-killer-and-the-mayor-20030607
- ↑ https://archive.md/Finxv
- ↑ Gilles Souillès, L'affaire Alègre, la vérité assassinée, hugodoc éditeur
- ↑ Émission Faites entrer l'accusé - Patrice Alègre, le sang et la rumeur, France 2, sent on 18 January 2015 at 22h40
- ↑ http://lci.tf1.fr/france/justice/2009-03/fanny-et-patricia-condamnees-pour-denonciation-calomnieuse-4868127.html
- ↑ https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/societe/justice/les-dessous-de-l-affaire-baudis_495280.html
- ↑ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/1434241/Ex-mayor-cleared-of-sex-scandal.html
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