Twenty-one months after his violent road accident under drugs, Pierre Palmade was sentenced on Wednesday to five years in prison, two of which were suspended at the end of a trial which confronted him with his victims, in this highly publicized case.
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After a full hour of deliberation, the Melun court found him guilty of involuntary injuries to a family in the collision he caused on a road in Seine-et-Marne on February 10, 2023 while driving under the influence of narcotics.
In accordance with the prosecution’s requisitions, the judges sentenced him to five years in prison, three of which were suspended on probation. For the two years in prison, the court issued a deferred committal warrant with provisional execution.
Pierre Palmade will be incarcerated in the Bordeaux region, where he lives.
Appearing very marked, the 56-year-old comedian spoke directly to the victims during the trial, on the occasion of his first public expression in this highly publicized affair.
“I would like to ask you for forgiveness from the depths of my being,” he declared with his hand on his stomach, small childish eyes staring into the middle of a livid face.
“The serious injuries of MY and the trauma of Mrs. C. (who lost her six-month-old fetus, editor’s note), it knocked me down. I am really overwhelmed, tested to see them in real life,” said the man who had become a showbiz pariah.
This tragedy was one of the 52,000 road accidents recorded in mainland France that year. But the notoriety of this popular artist with a sympathetic image will trigger a media storm, revealing the dark side of a man mired in drug addiction.
This Friday, February 10, 2023, Pierre Palmade has been partying continuously without sleeping for three days between Paris and his country house in Cély-en-Bière, alternating injections of 3MMC (a synthetic drug), taking cocaine and games of “ chemsex” with “sex friends”. “We are really like zombies, vegetables, naked, bloody,” he described to the judges.
With two companions on board, he takes the wheel to go shopping. “I see all three of us leaving the house euphoric and then it’s dark, I open my eyes and I’m (at the) Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital,” said Pierre Palmade, who said he had never no memory of the accident.
On his hospital bed, his loved ones explain to him what happened. And there, “I understand that I am in hell”, confided the artist, weakened by a stroke which occurred shortly after.
17 months of abstinence
In the vehicle arriving in front of Pierre Palmade’s Peugeot, three people were seriously injured by the impact: a 38-year-old man, his six-year-old son and his 27-year-old sister-in-law, who lost the baby after the impact. that she was waiting for.
Their vital prognoses for a time compromised, they still suffer today from serious physical and psychological after-effects. Broken lives that the playwright was confronted with at the opening of his trial.
Six months pregnant at the time of the accident, the passenger underwent an emergency cesarean section. Her unborn daughter, named Solin, was declared dead after 32 minutes of resuscitation, without giving any sign of extra-uterine life.
“It is very difficult for me to be present today in this room, there is a lot of work being done with my psychiatrist,” declared the young mother of a two-month-old girl, suffering from post-traumatic stress.
With his left arm in a sling, advancing towards the bar with infinite slowness with the help of a crutch, driver Yuksel Y. described his new life circumscribed by pain and injuries.
“I was a team leader, I had friends, during the weekend I tried to enjoy with my children, my family (…), today I can no longer do this kind of thing,” said he testified via a Turkish interpreter.
For 17 months and his nightclub outing in Bordeaux which made the rounds on social networks and outraged France – even the president of the court, who was moved by it at the hearing – Pierre Palmade has been abstinent. He undergoes urine screenings two to three times a week.
According to his sister Hélène Palmade and his sponsor at Narcotics Anonymous, his progress brings hope. “He is taking care of himself and I firmly believe for the first time that he will do everything right,” said his younger sister at the helm.
“I rediscover the simple pleasures of friendship, of family, of waking up in good shape, of writing personal thoughts,” assured the artist, who does not plan to one day return to the stage, but “is looking for a way to convey a message about drugs, a message of recovery and hope.”
