Nearly 250 women believe they were victimized by a civil servant at a French ministry, who allegedly secretly administered diuretics to them during job interviews and then took them to public places, waiting until they could no longer control their urge to urinate.
The allegations against Christian Negr relate to incidents from 2009 to 2018. The man, now over 60 years old, is under formal investigation on charges that include administering substances, invasion of privacy, and sexual assault, and is awaiting trial.
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Two of the women who have accused him, Anaïs de Vos and Marie-Hélène Bris, described to the BBC what they went through, as well as how it took them years to realize they weren’t the only victims.
“I couldn’t feel my legs anymore”
It was July 2011 when Anaïs de Vos, then 27, walked through the doors of the French Ministry of Culture in Paris for a job interview. The man who interviewed her was Christian Negre, a high-ranking official. He offered her coffee. She wasn’t in the habit of drinking coffee, but she accepted out of politeness, since he had made it himself. “It tasted bad, so I drank about half of it,” she recalls.
The interview began in the office, but a few minutes later Negre suggested they continue by taking a walk outside. As they walked through the streets of Paris, Anaïs began to feel something inexplicable. “I felt really weak. My legs didn’t feel right. I was scared. I didn’t know what was happening.”
At the same time, she felt a sudden and uncontrollable urge to urinate. She told him she urgently needed to find a restroom. “He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Oh, you need to pee?’” His behavior made her feel even more uncomfortable. “I felt like a child. I found the way he was looking at me very strange—almost with pleasure.”
According to her testimony, Negr led her to the door of a storage room under a bridge on the Seine. “You can do it here,” he told her. Anaïs panicked. “Images flashed through my mind of him pushing me into the room and closing the door behind me.”
The woman refused and insisted they continue. They headed toward the Louvre so she could use the restroom, but admission cost one euro, and she had left her wallet at the ministry. Negre told her that he didn’t have any money on him either.
The 27-year-old was now in despair and in pain as she tried to hold it in. She finally found a café where they let her use the restroom, but she didn’t make it in time. “I was already feeling very physically weak,” she recalls. Just before she reached the restroom, she lost control and urinated on herself.
Fifteen years later, she finds some comfort in the fact that this didn’t happen in front of the man she’s accusing. “At least he didn’t see me,” she says. After spending about three hours with him, she felt dizzy and exhausted. She didn’t get the job.
Anaïs had left that interview with the feeling that something very strange had happened, though she couldn’t explain what. For a moment, it had crossed her mind that perhaps someone had slipped something into her coffee, but she immediately dismissed the thought. “It’s the Ministry of Culture. That’s impossible,” she had told herself.
The incident, she says, affected her self-confidence, and in the years that followed, she pursued a less ambitious career path. Until, in 2019, she received a letter from the police. The officers revealed that they believed she was one of nearly 200 women whom Negr had allegedly drugged during job interviews. Since then, dozens more women have come forward as potential victims, bringing the total number to nearly 250. “I was shocked,” she says. “But I was relieved to learn that I wasn’t crazy. Something had indeed happened that day.”
The “Experiments P” file and the revelation of his sick actions
Even more chilling was what, according to Anaïs, the police revealed to her about Negr’s computer.
The authorities found a file titled “Experiments P,” in which women considered potential victims had been listed.
According to what Anais told the BBC, the file noted the time each woman arrived for the interview, the moment she was given the diuretic, how long it took for her to urinate, and even what kind of underwear she was wearing.
She is now convinced that the strange taste of the coffee Negr had offered her came from the diuretic. The investigation against him began in June 2018, when a colleague caught him taking photos of a woman from under a table, according to a statement from the prosecutor’s office. He was initially suspended from his position as regional director of Cultural Affairs and was dismissed from the Ministry of Culture in 2019.
Prosecutors report that in 2018 he told investigators that he had “subjected women to humiliating situations” during job interviews.
“He wouldn’t take his eyes off me; it was clearly a sexual assault.”
Marie-Hélène Bris gave a similar account; according to the BBC, her name was also found in Negr’s notes. He had interviewed her for a position at the Ministry of Culture in 2016 in Strasbourg.
Marie-Hélène says that Negre told her she seemed nervous and suggested they take a walk together along the canal so she could “relax.” During the walk, she, too, began to feel an uncontrollable urge to urinate. The pressure turned into intense pain.
According to her testimony, Negr told her he knew of a public restroom nearby. When they arrived, however, there was none. “I was really starting to suffer. I was in so much pain that I had turned pale and tears were streaming down my face.” In the end, she had no choice but to urinate in a public place. Negro offered to cover her with his jacket. “I was terribly ashamed,” she says. “He couldn’t take his eyes off me.”
For years, she carried the shame of what had happened. Like Anaïs, she only found out what had happened when the police contacted her. Marie-Hélène claims that, in addition to the psychological toll, she has also been experiencing problems with her urinary system ever since.
Although what she describes does not match the image most people have in mind when they hear the term “sexual assault,” she has no doubt about what happened to her. “I was attacked, drugged, and poisoned. To me, this is clearly a sexual assault,” she says.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in 26 years.”
The case is now part of a broader debate in France about so-called “chemical subjugation”—that is, the use of substances to gain control over another person.
The issue came to the forefront of French society following the case of Gisèle Pelico, whose husband was convicted in 2024 for drugging her and allowing strangers to rape her while she was unconscious.
This year, a pilot program was launched that allows women who suspect that someone has drugged them to submit samples of blood, urine, or hair samples for laboratory testing without first having to file an official complaint with the police.
Negre’s case, however, presents a significant peculiarity: many of the women had not even realized that they might have been drugged. Professor Jean-Claude Alvarez, who is in charge of the pilot program at the Raymond-Poincaré AP-HP Hospital, describes the use of diuretics in this way as “very unusual.”
As he said, he has never encountered anything similar in his 26 years as a toxicologist. The laboratory systematically tests samples for approximately 400 substances. “Now, in France, we’re also testing for diuretics,” he notes.
SOURCE: Proto Thema
