He chose to leave it at that. The former all-powerful director of the Institut Montaigne Laurent Bigorgne withdrew his appeal, making final his conviction in Paris for one year suspended sentence for unknowingly drugging an ex-collaborator at a party.
During a dinner at her supervisor and ex-brother-in-law in February 2022, Sophie Conrad felt ill after drinking half a gl of champagne. The head of the Institute’s public policy division had managed to leave the premises to go to the hospital. Expertise had shown that Laurent Bigorgne had poured MDMAa synthetic drug, in the gl of his collaborator, which he admitted in police custody.
A relative of Emmanuel Macron
Contrary to the prosecution, the court retained in its decision on December 8 a intention, believing that Laurent Bigorgne had wanted to “commit or ault against him”. At the helm, he had explained his “infamous, odious and cowardly” act by his hope that Sophie Conrad “heard” and “listened” to his “serious drift” of drug addictclaiming to consume up to “four grams per day” of cocaine.
But “I never touched Sophie, I would never, never abuse her”had ured Laurent Bigorgne, a network man close to Emmanuel Macron, who had resigned from the liberal think tank after the revelation of the facts.
In its judgment, the court had rather considered that the boss of the Institut Montaigne, who could not “ignore the ly disinhibiting nature of such a drug”, could not “seriously invoke the fact that the administration of MDMA was intended to discuss”, while there was “no difficulty in this regard in the relationship between the two protagonists”.
“The path to follow”
Laurent Bigorgne immediately announced, through his lawyer Sébastien Schapira, to appeal this “incoherent decision”. Me Schapira declined to comment on his client’s withdrawal. “This case was epic in terms of the balance of power with the prosecution and the government who did everything to protect him. This is the path that must be followed in terms of violence, ”reacted Sophie Conrad’s lawyer, Arié Alimi.
The court’s decision to retain intent led Sophie Conrad to file a separate complaint for “attempted ”. The case is still ongoing. Another complaint, accusing the Parisian investigators of bias in this case, was entrusted at the beginning of January to an investigating judge from Lille.