• Paris: Macron's candidate for mayor resigns over a sex video
  • Pavlenski: This artist stuck his scrotum on the floor of the Red Square in Moscow
  • Performance: They stop a controversial Russian artist for setting fire to the entrance of the Security Service

The man who has spread the sexual video and intimate conversations of Benjamin Griveaux is an artist. Russian, exiled in France, controversial. And masochist because he self-injures in his 'perfomances'. President Emmanuel Macron's candidate for mayor has resigned. Piotr Pavlenski risks two years in jail . He has already served his sentence for burning the doors of a branch of the Bank of France.

Pavlenski claimed his action in 'Libération' and justified it in several French media. I wanted to denounce the hypocrisy of the candidate. On his website 'PornoPolitique' he presented the candidate as a politician capable of moving from the Socialist Party to the March in March of the "neoliberal Macron".

"In his campaign, Benjamin Griveaux highlights his fanatic faith in family values ​​... But here is the paradox, he writes to a young woman that family and children are a prison." He then hung screenshots with intimate messages between a man and a woman and a video showing a man's genitals.

Griveaux has not denied that the comments are his although formally they have not been identified. The Russian artist claims that he obtained the video from a "source" who had a spoiled relationship with the politician.

Griveaux's lawyer, Richard Malka, announced lawsuits against "publications that violate the private life" of his client. French law provides for two years in jail and 60,000 euros of fine to whom he disseminates "words and images of a sexual nature". He has remembered the Interior Minister himself, Christophe Castaner, who added: "These facts must be prosecuted."

Pavlenski already knows the French prisons. He spent a year in pretrial detention for setting fire to the facade of a branch of the Bank of France in the Place de la Bastille in Paris. The events occurred in October 2017. He had obtained political asylum in May of the same year. Sentenced in January 2019 to three years in jail, of which one under firm prison, was released on account of his period of preventive detention.

Masochistic Performances in Russia

A similar action made him visit the prison in his native Russia. He sprayed gasoline and set fire to the doors of the Loubianka, the historical headquarters of the KGB, the Soviet secret services. He was detained for seven months and was fined for "damages."

Born in 1984 in Leningrad (today St. Petersburg), the son of a father who died of alcoholism and a mother nurse of a psychiatric, was interviewed by 'Libération' in 2016 on the occasion of the publication of 'The Pavlenski case, politics as art ', interview book. He refused to pose naked: "When I get naked in some of my actions it is because it is related to what I mean."

Griveaux announces his retirement at a press conference, this morning in Paris.

Thus, when he rolled himself up without clothes in barbed wire to protest against Putin "he wanted to show the situation of the man treated as cattle." In 2012 he sewed his lips in support of the Pussy Riot, condemned for "desecrating" the Moscow cathedral in a "punk prayer" critical also with the Russian leader.

In the same self-mutilation line the scrotum was nailed to the cobblestones of the Red Square in Moscow to denounce "the apathy and political indifference and fatalism of contemporary Russian society". Or, in the manner of Van Gogh, the lobe of his right ear was cut in protest of repressive psychiatric practices.

He has two daughters with Oksana Shalygina, whom he refuses to call "his wife" because he does not believe in marriage or "ownership of bodies." Present in the encounter with 'Libération', she defined it as "a free relationship". And he said that once they broke up and she cut half of her pinky : "The blood washes the betrayal. The fact that Piotr accepts it was a consequence of the reestablishment of the relationship."

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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