PARIS (AP) — A French former senator goes on trial Monday in Paris over accusations of drugging another lawmaker to sexually assault her in a case that echoes the landmark drugging-and-rape trial that riveted France and turned Gisèle Pelicot into a global icon of the fight against sexual violence.
Joël Guerriau, 68, is accused of putting the drug MDMA in a glass of champagne he served to parliament member Sandrine Josso, who left after she started feeling sick. He has admitted serving her a drink spiked with MDMA but says it was an accident.
Josso 50, has since been outspoken about the case and helped lead a parliamentary investigation into drug-related crimes.
Here’s what to know about the case that brought national attention to drug-facilitated assault in France.
Guerriau is charged with the use and possession of drugs, and with secretly administering a discernment-altering substance to commit a rape or sexual assault.
According to Josso, a centrist member of parliament, the center-right senator invited her to his apartment in Paris for what she believed to be a reelection celebration. Josso had known Guerriau for years and considered him as a friend.
Speaking to French media, she said she started feeling unwell quickly after drinking champagne.
“I had heart palpitations. I had never experienced all these horrible symptoms where I felt like I was going to have a cardiac arrest,” she described.
Josso also said that at one point she spotted a small packet in Guerriau's hand. She headed out, took a taxi and went to a hospital, where MDMA was found in a blood test.
Two months later, when she made her comeback at the National Assembly, she described the scene.
“I went to a friend’s house to celebrate his re-election. I came out terrified,” she told lawmakers. “I discovered an assailant. I then realized that I had been drugged without knowing it. That’s what we call drug-facilitated assault,” she added.
Guerriau says he had no intention to drug Josso or to assault her.
The ex-senator's lawyers have argued that their client made a “handling error” that caused him to serve Josso a drugged drink.
They admit that he had the drugs at home, saying he was suffering from depression, and say that he put them in the glass the previous day planning to drink them himself, but didn't do so and then offered the glass to Josso by mistake.
Guerriau remained in the senator for almost two years after being charged despite political pressure to resign. He resigned in October, presenting the move as a political decision with no link to the legal proceedings.
Drugging a person to commit rape or sexual assault is punishable by up to 5 years in prison. Guerriau also faces up to 10 years in prison for drug possession.
Less than a year after the senator's case broke out, France was rocked by the Gisèle Pelicot’s case put, which put a worldwide spotlight on drug-facilitated sexual abuse.
Pelicot’s ex-husband and 50 other men were convicted of sexually assaulting her while she was under chemical submission between 2011 and 2020 .
The harrowing and unprecedented trial exposed how pornography, chatrooms and men’s indifference to — or hazy understanding of — consent is fueling rape culture.
Josso became a major figure in France's fight against drug-related sexual assault, joining an association set up by Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter, Caroline Darian, and co-authoring a parliamentary report about drug-facilitated sexual abuse.
In the wake of the Pelicot trial, France adopted a new law in October 2025 defining rape and other sexual assault as any non-consensual sexual act. Until then, rape was defined under French law as penetration or oral sex using “violence, coercion, threat or surprise.”
FILE - View of the Senate Assembly, from the Luxembourg garden, in Paris, on Sept. 19, 2013. (AP Photo/Remy de la Mauviniere, File)
