The investigation into the alleged intimate video blackmail is progressing. The mayor of Saint-Étienne, his ex-chief of staff Pierre Gauttieri, his ex-educational assistant Samy Kéfi-Jérôme and the former companion of the latter, through whom the scandal happened, Gilles Rossary-Lenglet, are heard by investigators from the Lyon judicial police this Tuesday afternoon, April 4, under police custody. "It's the normal procedure that is taking its course," his chief of staff, Pierre Chappel, told AFP.
The mayor of Saint-Étienne and president of the metropolis, elected in 2014 and re-elected in 2020, has been at the heart of a judicial investigation for three months into the shooting and use of a sexual video in which we can seeing his centrist former first deputy and political rival Gilles Artigues being massaged by a man in a hotel room in late 2014.
Namely accused by Gilles Artigues, placed in police custody in mid-September 2022, quoted in damning audio recordings, the 50-year-old elected official has always claimed his innocence and repeated several times that he would not resign, even in the event of indictment.
Quickly excluded from LR, Gaël Perdriau retired from his duties, while remaining at the head of the municipality and the metropolis of Saint-Étienne, which had however voted in December in favor of his resignation.
Faced with criticism, the mayor has always defended the "presumption of innocence" by denouncing a "media shelling" linked, according to him, to a "hostile policy" of Laurent Wauquiez, the LR president of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region.
The affair has already prompted him to dismiss his chief of staff Pierre Gauttieri, while his municipal deputy Gilles Rossary-Lenglet, accused of having shot the compromising images, resigned.
