French civil servant drugged us to make us urinate on ourselves, say accusers

Accusers claim a French civil servant drugged them, causing them to urinate on themselves. Anaïs de Vos suspects a cup of coffee offered by Christian Nègre was laced.

"I was really weak. I couldn't really feel my legs any more," Anaïs de Vos recounts. "I was scared. I didn't know what was happening."

The incident occurred in July 2011 when Anaïs, then 27, was interviewing for a position at France's Ministry of Culture in Paris. Although she typically avoided coffee, she accepted a cup out of politeness when Nègre, a senior civil servant conducting the interview, offered one. She told BBC Global Women that he prepared it himself, but "it tasted bad… so I drank about half."

The interview began in Nègre's office, but after a few minutes, he suggested they continue their discussion outside. As they walked through the streets of Paris, Anaïs began to experience an intense and uncontrollable urge to urinate. She informed him of her urgent need for a toilet.

"He looked me right in the eye and said, 'Oh, do you need a wee?'" she recalls. "I felt like a child. I thought it was really weird the way he looked at me, almost gleeful."

She states he then directed her to a storage cupboard door under a bridge on the River Seine, telling her, "You can do it here."

Anaïs is now one of nearly 250 women who believe Nègre drugged them in alleged incidents between 2009 and 2018, subjecting them to "chemical submission," where drugs are used to control an individual. The concept of chemical submission gained prominence in France in 2024 after Gisele Pelicot's husband was convicted of sedating her and arranging for strangers to rape her while she was unconscious.

"I started to panic," Anaïs continues. "I had visions of him pushing me into the room and closing the door behind me."

Finding the situation "too strange," she insisted they move on. They walked to the Louvre to use the restrooms there, but they cost one euro, and she had left her purse at the ministry's offices. Nègre claimed he also had no cash. Desperate and in pain from trying to hold her urine, Anaïs eventually found a cafe that allowed her to use their toilet.

By then, "I felt really weak physically," she says. As she approached the bathroom, she lost control and wet herself.

Reflecting on 2011, Anaïs finds some solace in the fact that she urinated out of Nègre's sight. "At least he didn't see me," she says. "I was so grateful I was only wearing a dress," she adds, explaining it made it easier to conceal what had happened.

After three hours with Nègre, she says she "felt dizzy and drained." She did not get the job and harbored suspicions about him, but couldn't pinpoint what had made her so uncomfortable. Anaïs felt the incident damaged her self-confidence, leading her to pursue a less ambitious career path in the following years.

In 2019, she received a letter from the police. Upon meeting them, she learned they suspected she was one of almost 200 women Nègre was accused of drugging during job interviews, purportedly for roles at the ministry.

"I was shocked," she says. "But I was happy to know I wasn't crazy. Something had happened that day." Dozens more alleged victims have since come forward.

Police believe Nègre used diuretics, which are medications used to manage conditions like high blood pressure and cause the body to produce excess urine. Anaïs had a fleeting thought on the day she met Nègre that he might have put something in her drink, but dismissed it, telling herself, "It's the Ministry of Culture. It's not possible."

Anaïs states police informed her they found a spreadsheet of alleged victims on Nègre's computer, titled "Experiments P," which is how they located her. The document, she says, recorded the women's arrival times for interviews, when the diuretic was administered, how long it took before they urinated, and what underwear they were wearing. Looking back, Anaïs is now convinced the strange taste in the coffee Nègre made her was the diuretic.

The investigation into Nègre began in June 2018, when a colleague caught him photographing a woman from beneath a table, according to a prosecutor's office statement released in February this year. He was initially suspended from his role as regional director of cultural affairs before being dismissed by the Ministry of Culture in 2019. Prosecutors stated that in 2018, he told investigators he had "imposed humiliating situations on women" during job interviews.

Many of the women say they first realized they might be victims when police contacted them. Some came forward after seeing Anaïs and other accusers in media reports.

Nègre, who is in his 60s, is now under formal investigation on charges including drugging, invasion of privacy, and sexual assault. He is awaiting trial. The BBC presented the allegations in this article to Nègre through his lawyer, but he declined to comment.

Marie-Hélène Brice was another person named in Nègre's notes. He interviewed her for a Ministry of Culture job in 2016 in Strasbourg, where he was then working. She says he told her she looked stressed and suggested a walk outside to "calm her nerves." As they strolled along the canal, Marie-Hélène, like Anaïs, felt an uncontrollable and painful urge to urinate. She says Nègre told her he knew of a nearby public toilet, but upon arrival, there was none.

"I was really starting to suffer… pains to the point that I was white, pale, I had tears streaming down," she says. Marie-Hélène says she had no choice but to urinate in public. She claims Nègre offered to shield her with his jacket. "I was terribly embarrassed," she says. "He didn't take his eyes off me."

Marie-Hélène says that for years she felt ashamed. Like Anaïs, she was contacted by police who informed her she was among Nègre's alleged victims. "It was a very big shock," she adds. Marie-Hélène says that in addition to psychological distress, she has also been left with urinary problems. She explains that while the events might not fit the typical pattern of sexual assault, she has no doubts about what happened to her: "I have been attacked, I have been intoxicated, I have been poisoned, but for me it is a sexual assault, clearly."

The issue of chemical submission has been championed by French MP Sandrine Josso. She became a leading campaigner after French senator Joel Guerriau was found guilty this year of spiking her drink with ecstasy to sexually assault her. Josso argues that France has long failed to adequately support women who have been drugged and prosecute offenders.

She was instrumental in introducing a pilot program this year where women who suspect they have been drugged can submit blood, urine, or hair samples to a lab for testing without filing a formal police complaint. "People are mobilising, victims are reporting more, filing more complaints, and that's important," Josso tells BBC Global Women.

However, there are limitations. Anaïs, Marie-Hélène, and many other alleged victims of Nègre did not suspect they had been drugged, and unless testing occurs very soon after drugging, substances won't appear in blood and urine samples. Drugs may be detectable for longer in hair, but with time, it becomes harder to pinpoint when they were administered.

The use of diuretics in this manner is "very unusual," according to Prof Jean-Claude Alvarez, who runs the pilot program at the Raymond-Poincaré AP-HP Hospital. He states he has never seen anything like it in 26 years as a toxicologist. The lab routinely tests for 400 substances, and "now, in France, we are looking for diuretics," he adds.

It has been 15 years since Anaïs's encounter with Nègre and seven years since she first spoke to police. Like many other accusers, she is frustrated by the lengthy delay in Nègre's case coming to court. Meanwhile, the alleged perpetrator has continued to work in human resources, according to Fondation des Femmes, a women's rights group supporting about 30 of the affected women.

"Everything is unsettling and I am angry at how we are treated," says Anaïs, now 42 years old. She says she first spoke to police in 2019 but heard nothing about the case until 2023, despite emailing them many times. "For four years, I was alone with the knowledge that I was a victim. I didn't know what to do," she says. "I am very angry with the justice system."

Marie-Hélène describes this waiting as "secondary victimisation." "As a victim, I have to prove the impact, go to a psychiatrist, write specific notes," she says. The delays have made what happened harder to bear. "We do not necessarily feel [we are] completely taken seriously," Marie-Hélène says.

Kalliopi Mingeirou from UN Women told the BBC that governments, police, and justice systems need to do more to tackle drug-facilitated sexual assault, and that authorities are facing "very serious challenges," with delays in alleged abuse cases "destroying women's lives." The BBC asked the French police, judiciary, and government to respond to criticisms of their handling of the case, but they did not respond.

For a long time, Marie-Hélène remained silent until she stopped feeling shame. "I don't have to hide myself - I am a victim," she says. "It is important for me to speak publicly because it allowed some victims to recognize themselves, to discover they were a victim and to file a complaint in turn. Speaking out is necessary in the world in which we live, it is important to talk about sexist and sexual violence."

This report is part of the Global Women series from the BBC World Service, sharing untold and important stories from around the globe.