“I wanted to go to the toilet and, in the corridor, Denis Baupin pressed against the wall and tried forcefully to kiss me”.
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His wife, Housing Minister Emmanuelle Cosse, said she was shocked by the allegations against her husband but that she still had faith in him.
Stephanie Marteau and Aziz Zemouri claimed the journalist in Davos was bending over to pick up a pen when Sapin said: ‘Ah, but what are you showing me here?’ and then snapped the elastic of her knickers.
“Sexual harassment and even more so sexual aggression are totally foreign” to the 53-year-old Baupin, one of parliament’s six deputy speakers, the lawyer added.
The former deputy speaker is suing for defamation.
Sapin said he was sorry about what he did but insisted it should not be “confused with the seriousness of harassment or sexual assault”.
In a statement released on Monday afternoon, Mr Baupin’s lawyer said he “completely denies the claim of sexual harassment and of sexual violence, both of which are alien concepts to him”.
Sandrine Rousseau, a former EELV spokesperson, alleged in comments made to the website Mediapart that Baupin had attacked her in October 2011 during a meeting on preparations for the presidential election the following year.
The encounter made Rousseau “very uneasy”, she said.
Mediapart, which published the women’s claims against Baupin, said it had spent several months investigating the accusations.
“I immediately thought that it was absolutely not normal that this should happen to me”.
Two other elected Green party members, Elen Debost, who is deputy mayor of the central city of Le Mans, and Annie Lahmer, a member of the Paris regional government, have also accused Baupin of sexual impropriety.
“To think the Denis Baupin affair is isolated is a mistake”.
She said she did not realise the scale of the problem until approached by the media, and that “a lot of people kept quiet so as not to harm his campaign”.
A similar petition was circulated by female journalists in France in May a year ago complaining about sexism and sexual harassment by male French politicians.
“End the Omerta” was the slogan adopted by the group behind Tuesday’s appeal, which stated: “It’s time to speak out, to bring this impunity to an end, time for men to change their behaviour rather than for women to adapt to it”.
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Strauss-Kahn, who was widely tipped to become France’s next president, quit as head of the International Monetary Fund after his arrest on the basis of rape accusations by a NY hotel maid, with whom he reached a financial settlement after criminal charges were dropped.
