“I am in correctional for an empty file”, estimates Pierre Ménès

Europe 1 with AFP 3:41 p.m., June 09, 2022

The former star football columnist Pierre Ménès, whose trial for "sexual assault" has just been postponed to 2023, said he was innocent in the newspaper

, describing in particular as "pure invention" the accusations of a receptionist at the Parc des Princes.

"It's a pure invention"

"I never approached this woman, near or far. It's a pure invention," he said in this interview published online Wednesday evening.

The 58-year-old sports journalist is being prosecuted after several separate charges.

First, alleged "touching" in the chest and stomach reported to the police by this hostess after the PSG-Nantes match on November 20 in Paris.

The woman had not filed a complaint and was not present or represented on Wednesday at the hearing, where the trial was postponed to March 8, 2023. "I am in correctional for an empty file, with no one in front. I do not don't understand. It hurts me a lot," he added.

The journalist, who had filed a complaint for slanderous denunciation, was himself absent from the hearing after having "spent three weeks in intensive care" due to an infection.

On Wednesday, he was also to answer for the so-called "Nike" case.

In an article published in March 2021,

indicated that Mr. Ménès had been the subject of a complaint for "sexual assault" filed in October 2018 by an employee of a Parisian store of the sports equipment manufacturer.

According to the investigation site, this complaint had been dismissed on January 17, 2019.

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 An investigation opened against Pierre Ménès on his actions at Canal +

Revised penal guidelines

According to

, a second saleswoman at this store accused the journalist of similar facts, which led to him being summoned by the Paris prosecutor's office for a reminder of the law.

In both cases, these penal orientations were revised after the facts of the Parc des Princes, underlines Le Parisien.

Mr. Ménès categorically disputes it.

"It was in the basketball department. So I did what basketball players do, chest to chest, in a kind of check. That's what we call sexual assault," he told Le

. , referring to one of the two cases.

The journalist had left Canal + on July 1 after the broadcast in the spring of 2021 of a documentary on sexism in the newsrooms, with incriminating sequences, cut during editing at the request of the channel, suspected of having protected him.