“Overwhelmed” and “tested”, the comedian asks “forgiveness” from the victims

This Wednesday, comedian Pierre Palmade said at his trial “overwhelmed” by the serious physical and psychological injuries caused to the victims of the road accident he caused under the influence of drugs in February 2023, in Seine-et-Marne.

“The serious injuries of MY and the trauma of MC (who lost her fetus, editor’s note), it knocked me down. I am truly overwhelmed, tested to see them in real life”declared the 56-year-old artist in a hoarse voice during his first words on the stand. Turning towards the benches of the civil parties, his hand on his stomach, his face ravaged, he addressed them directly for their “ask for forgiveness from the depths of your being”.

Turning towards the benches of the civil parties, his hand on his stomach, his face ravaged and livid, Pierre Palmade addressed them directly for their “ask for forgiveness from the depths of your being”.

“I'm in hell”

In a hoarse voice, the man of theater and television, stuck for years in his drug addiction, returned to the circumstances which led to this dramatic collision. For three days, Pierre Palmade had been partying continuously without sleeping between Paris and his country house in Cély-en-Bière, alternating between injections of 3-MMC (a synthetic drug), taking cocaine and playing games of ” chemsex” with «sex friends».

“We are really like zombies, vegetables, naked, bloody”he describes to the judges. On Friday evening, at nightfall, the comedian gets in the car with two companions to go buy dinner at the local supermarket before the arrival of his dealer responsible for restocking drugs. Dozed by 3-MMC, he takes several lines of cocaine before getting behind the wheel in order to “re-awaken”.

“I see the three of us leaving the house euphoric and then it’s dark, I open my eyes and I’m (at the) Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital”says Pierre Palmade, who says he has no memory of the accident. According to the investigating judge, in the straight line of a departmental road, the vehicle driven by the comedian makes a sudden departure from the road and will collide on the lane opposite the car of a family driving in the opposite direction . On his hospital bed, “I am told that there are injured people, a family, the loss of a baby, manslaughter… Lots of words that I don’t understand”confides Pierre Palmade. “I understand that I am in hell.”