Marie-Hélène Brice thought she was finally getting her life back.
Four months after the birth of her second child and unemployed, the prospect of working atFrance's hallowed culture ministry was a bright one. Better still, the 2016 job interview was with Christian Nègre, a top ministry official.
"He told me we would discuss career possibilities over coffee," says the 39-year-old.
But when he proposed a stroll by the river after she'd finished her drink, she suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to urinate, then excruciating pain. "I was in agony. I had tears in my eyes."
With no toilet in sight, Mr Nègre came up with a suggestion. "I'll hide you with my jacket." Crouched under his coat near the water, she lost control. "He didn't look away," Ms Brice says. "He looked me in the eyes."
She apologised repeatedly. Perhaps it was childbirth, she thought. Perhaps she had done something wrong. Ashamed, she drove home in tears, convinced she had ruined her chances, and fell into depression.
Two years later, police told her she was not to blame.
Ms Brice is one of seven women who spoke to The Telegraph of thealleged abusethey suffered at the hands of Mr Nègre, a former senior civil servant and human resources director at France's culture ministry.
Now in his 60s, he stands accused of drugging a total of 248 women between 2009 and 2018 during fake job interviews as part of asadistic power play.
The women recounted how he would spike their coffee and tea with powerful diuretics and then take them on long walks to watch them squirm.
Police say he later recorded his observations on an Excel spreadsheet entitled "experiments".
The apparent aim was to chart their descent into humiliation, and the moment they lost control of their bladder. He relished every detail, from the colour of their underwear to the strength of urine flow, his alleged victims told The Telegraph.
Mr Nègre also took covert snaps of them in the process. Chillingly, inside the culture ministry, his nickname was "le photographe" – the photographer.
Yet he was able to carry on his sick activities untroubled for many years, and was only caught after a junior colleague saw him photographing a senior female official at work in 2018.
When police searched his phone and computer, they uncovered his files and multiple photos, many of women's legs taken from under the table. He was charged with administering harmful substances without consent.
"It was a double shock," says Ms Brice. "First, you think it's your fault. Then you discover you were poisoned."
After their humiliation, Mr Nègre's victims are now frustrated by judicial delays. Opened in 2019, the investigation is in its sixth year. No trial date has been set, and Mr Nègre remains free pending the outcome.
And now, prosecutors have suddenly given his alleged victims only one month to hand in fresh testimonies before they officially close the inquiry.
Anaïs de Vos shudders at the memory of police reading from an Excel file with her name on it.
Her interview with Mr Nègre took place in Paris in July 2011, when she was 27 and working in the foreign ministry. Like Ms Brice, she was offered a drink before being led on a walk through the Tuileries Gardens towards the Louvre.
"I realised something was wrong when he suggested I relieve myself under a bridge," says the 42-year-old fibre artist, who now lives in Quimper, Brittany. He pointed to a small service room. "I thought: if I go in there, he might attack me."
She refused. She held on for hours, increasingly dizzy, her heart racing. Eventually, she broke away and rushed into a café near the Louvre. The toilet was upstairs. She did not make it in time.
"I started to wet myself just as I reached the door," she says. She managed to dry herself before returning home, feeling faint and deeply ashamed.
In 2019, police contacted her. An officer read aloud from what investigators said they had found on his computer:
"Début 09:15."
"Manifestation 10:25."
"Demande 10:40."
"Délivrance 11:10."
Start. Onset. Request. Relief.
He noted that she "still has to hold on". That she "moans". That she "disappears for 15 minutes". That she replied "coldly" when pressed. He recorded the time he administered a diuretic, the moment she asked for a "technical break", and the moment she lost control.
"He wrote everything down," she said.
Elise Daniaud Oudeh, 38, now completing a PhD in political science, met Mr Nègre in 2015 after he contacted her on LinkedIn about a role in the cultural sector, when she was studying art history.
She recalled drinking tea in a ministry meeting room. A walk through gardens. An overwhelming need to urinate. She relieved herself discreetly near the Seine.
Years later, police showed her the images of her shoes beside a puddle.
"I thought it was my fault," Ms Oudeh said. "I never imagined someone could put something in my drink at a ministry."
For her, the case challenges what she calls the "monster" myth.
"We still think that rape, rapists and paedophiles are actually exceptions, they're monsters… No, they are integrated people who have children, who are married, who work, and they are at all social levels," she said.
"All these cases are piling up… the more we talk about it, the more we'll realise how structurally we have a societal problem."
There is anger, too, that after leaving the civil service, Mr Nègre was able to resurface at a business school in Caen under a different surname, changed to Genre. He was later unmasked by students and dismissed. He has recently retired, said lawyers for the victims.
Mr Nègre has not publicly apologised to the women. When first contacted about the allegations in 2019, he acknowledged administering diuretics and taking some photographs, but minimised his conduct and the number of women affected.
His lawyer declined to comment to The Telegraph while the investigation continues.
Despite the scale of complaints, he remains free.
"It's overwhelming, heartbreaking, infuriating … it's yet another failure of society to protect and repair these women," said Ms Oudeh.
For Floriane Volt of Fondation des Femmes, which supports around 50 of the women, Mr Nègre's decision to dub the women's ordeal "experiments" is telling.
"Experiments are done on objects. On animals," she said. She described the ministry as having been used as a "hunting ground".
In 2023, the state was ordered to pay compensation of up to €16,000 to seven alleged victims in a civil case.
However, the culture ministry was found not to be at fault as an employer. An appeal rests with the council of state.
"Everyone knew," insisted Ms Brice, whom Mr Nègre secretly photographed 12 times. "Some women said: wear trousers if you're going to see him. Not a skirt."
Others advised avoiding one-to-one meetings.
Women say police failed them
At least one woman filed a complaint immediately after her interview, but police failed to follow up.
Among them was Julie (not her real name), who was 22 in December 2015 when she met Mr Nègre for an internship, three years before he was caught.
After suffering a three-hour walk and the humiliation of public urination, she smelt a rat.
Her psychoanalyst mother later told her, "You've definitely had to deal with a pervert who has a well-established modus operandi. Go see a doctor." She was referred to a special clinic, which told her to file a legal complaint with the police.
A female officer received her.
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"I will remember her response for the rest of my life," she told The Telegraph in her first public testimony. "She told me, 'You can't file a legal complaint for someone that high up.'" She threw in the towel.
Ms de Vos didn't even get that far.
"The police would have laughed in my face," she said. "I had no proof. Ninety-six per cent of rape cases don't reach trial. So for me, who peed myself and had to go to a café to say I was almost raped, what were my chances?"
The case has returned to the headlines asGisèle Pelicot publishes her bookfollowing the trial in which her former husband,Dominique Pelicot, was convictedalongside 49 other men of drugging and orchestrating her rape. The trial forced France to confront the scale of what is known as "chemical submission".
"Thanks to her, chemical submission has a real name," said Ms Oudeh. "Shame has to change sides."
But she slammed the new deadline for additional complainants as "ridiculous".
"For 10 years nothing, and now one month?"
For Sylvie Delezenne, 45, a marketing expert from Lille, the physical and psychological scars have been lasting.
She met Mr Nègre in 2015 while seeking work. After tea came the walk. It went on for hours. Her bladder swelled so dramatically that her abdomen protruded.
"It was like I was pregnant," she recalled.
Her feet, as she was forced to walk along cobblestones in heels, became so swollen they bled inside her shoes.
"I thought I was going to die. I thought my body was going to explode," she said.
Under a footbridge near the Tuileries, she finally crouched to urinate.
"It burned. It was extremely long," she said, adding that Mr Nègre stood beside her, removed his pastel blue jacket, and feigned looking away.
In fact, he later noted: "The stream was powerful, the knickers were black."
"The level of detail shocked me," she said. "I had made sure he couldn't see anything."
Afterwards, he scolded her: "You could have been more careful."
After the disastrous interview, she stopped applying for jobs. Her unemployment benefits ran out. She later developed cancer and has since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
"When I go to the toilet, it brings everything back. I have nightmares," she said.
For a long time, she said, she was too embarrassed to tell anyone. Now she speaks openly. "Now I'm no longer ashamed."
Ms Delezenne has also testified at a parliamentary commission into chemical submission led by Sandrine Josso, an MP, whose own case, in which a former senator was convicted earlier this year of drugging her drink with MDMA and sentenced to four years in prison, brought renewed national focus to the issue.
For several of the women, what makes the case particularly disturbing is the sexualised dimension they said underpinned the encounters.
"For me, it's sexual assault," says Ms Brice. "He didn't touch me, but the aim was still to get pleasure from making me suffer for more than two hours."
Sylvie believes Mr Nègre's actions amount to a form of paraphilia.
"There are sexual disorders linked to urination," she says. "For me, this was about seeing us lose control. About domination."
Her anger is directed not only at him but at the institution.
"I'm angry with the people who knew," she said. "He had a reputation."
Caroline Sauvadon was 26 and unemployed when Mr Nègre contacted her in 2016 via LinkedIn.
"Working at the culture ministry would be exceptional, a dream come true," she said.
After a cappuccino with a "strange taste", he suggested a walk. Again in the Tuileries, the urge hit.
"I was wearing heels and it was very hard on the cobblestones. The pain resonated in my bladder with every step."
Mr Nègre suggested she relieve herself outside.
Angry at his insistence, she refused forcefully. "There's no way I'm going to urinate in front of you. You're out of your mind."
She made it to a pay toilet near the Louvre after female staff took pity on her. She remembers his "disappointed" look.
That evening, she tried to make light of it with friends in her acting class."I had the worst job interview ever - you're going to laugh," she told them.
One friend didn't. "Your story is really strange," she said, later asking her father, a senior civil servant, to enquire discreetly. The message came back: "Nègre doesn't have a good reputation."
Proud that she resisted, Ms Sauvadon said she suffered nightmares about being exposed in filthy toilets and often wets her bed, though for years she was too ashamed to tell anyone.
Not any more. "Shame has to change sides," she said, echoing Ms Pelicot.
Her anger is directed at the system that allowed him to continue unabated. "He got away with it his entire career," she said. She is appalled that the culture ministry has filed as a civil plaintiff.
The experience reshaped her professional life. She is retraining as an occupational psychologist. "I don't want to be in human resources any more," she said. "For me, HR is also him."
Trainer drugged at gender equality workshop
For Vanessa (not her real name), the irony of her encounter with Mr Nègre runs deep.
She met him in 2017, not for a job but as his trainer in a workshop at the ministry on gender equality.
"Can you imagine? He gave me diuretics while I was teaching him gender equality," she says. "I find it cynical and disgusting.
"The part people overlook is that it happened in the workplace.
"Why didn't anyone intervene? There is a system that allows certain people not to be questioned because of their position."
Louise Bériot, a lawyer representing several plaintiffs, called it "a completely extraordinary case of chemical submission".
"Women who were drugged to make them pee. It was long treated as a joke. But we are not in the realm of something trivial. We are in the realm of power. Of humiliation."
Last year, France was condemned by the European Court of Human Rights in a separate sexual violence case for "secondary victimisation" – a term used when victims are further traumatised by the way authorities handle their complaints.
Several women fear the drawn-out Nègre investigation risks repeating that harm.
Nearly a decade on, they want recognition and a trial.
"I'd like this case to be over, for me, but also for the others," said Ms Oudeh. "Justice would recognise that it hears us, that it sees us as victims."
"I want to turn the page," said Ms Brice.
"But I can't yet."
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