A French senator accused of having drugged a parliamentary deputy with the intention of sexually assaulting her has been sent for trial, AFP learnt on Friday from a source close to the case.
Two investigating magistrates sent Senator Joel Guerriau for trial for the alleged November 2023 incident, said the source, confirming a report by France 2’s Complement d’enquete, an investigative television programme. 
The judges’ report, seen by AFP, says Guerriau, 67, is suspected of having spiked a glass of champagne with ecstasy that his colleague Sandrine Josso, now 49, was drinking. His intention, they alleged, was to rape or sexually assault her.
Guerriau will also be tried for possession of drugs.
“Joel Guerriau contests the allegations against him,” said his lawyers, Henri Carpentier and Marie Roumiantseva.
The truth will come in court “far from the caricatures and rumours put about until now”, they added. “Mr Guerriau does not fear the truth: he desires it.”
Josso’s lawyer Arnaud Godefroy said she was relieved at the decision, “which reflects the seriousness of her complaint”.
France’s Horizons party, led by former prime minister Edouard Philippe, suspended Guerriau in November 2023 after he was formally charged with drugging Josso as part of a plot to carry out a sexual assault.
Guerriau has denied any intention to sexually assault the lawmaker and has rejected the accusation that he deliberately drugged her, describing it as a “handling error”.
The allegations against the senator come months after Frenchman Dominique Pelicot was jailed for 20 years for repeatedly drugging his wife so he and strangers could rape her.
The shocking case, involving scores of men, received international coverage after his former wife, Gisele Pelicot, waived her right to anonymity and insisted on a public trial.
Earlier this month, the French Senate passed a bill to include lack of consent in the country’s criminal definition of rape, paving the way for its official adoption as law.
Consent-based rape laws already exist in several European countries including Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.
