In an interview given to The Tribunethis Sunday, January 12, Frédéric Beigbeder returns to the investigation for rape which was carried out against him in 2024. If it was dismissed, he assures that it made him think about his life choices.
For a year, Frédéric Beigbeder kept a low profile. The writer, who is releasing a new novel at the start of the year entitled A man alone, faced the police and the courts. In December 2023, a young woman filed a complaint against him for rape. She denounces events that took place in Pau when she was only 17 years old. Frédéric Beigbeder refutes these accusations but he is still placed in police custody, then released. After several months of investigation, the complaint was closed on July 26, 2024 due to “the absence of serious or consistent evidence” and“insufficiently characterized offense”. If he signs his return after this debacle, there is no question for the writer of making it the subject of his book. “I wanted to stay implicit. I don’t talk about the affair at all in the book, yet it is omnipresent. It is this affair which forced me to work on myself”he said in The Tribunethis Sunday, January 12.
The rape investigation against Frédéric Beigbeder opened his eyes to his life and his choices
When the journalist questions him in more detail on the subject, Frédéric Beigbeder opens up more about what he has changed in his life since his police custody. “There are two things. Adultery, first. It can be very funny in a Feydeau play, but it’s still betraying someone you love… I thought about it a lot this year: why glamorize deception? The second point is the question of empire: taking advantage of one’s notoriety to flirt with a woman forty years younger than oneself… In my personal life, it became pathetic, if not pathological. two points that made me have this book written”explains the 59-year-old writer and screenwriter.
Frédéric Beigbeder suffered a heart attack in December 2024
And A man alone talks about the story of his father, absent and deceased in 2023, in a romantic way, Frédéric Beigbeder’s own demons are not far away. At the end of December 2024, he suffered a heart attack. A heart attack which “coincides with the anniversary date of police custody”he notes. And to add: “Without this affair, I would not have written this book! If we want to change people, we have to start from the generation before. This is not to relieve me of my individual responsibility, but it explains everything. Unconsciously , you want to conform to your father’s model.”
Article written in collaboration with 6Médias
