Stéphane Plaza (center) accompanied by his lawyers Carlo Alberto Brusa and Helene Plumet, under the eye of the police, at the Paris Court.
AFP
The Paris prosecutor’s office requested, on Thursday, 18 months of suspended imprisonment and a fine of 10,000 euros against the famous real estate agent Stéphane Plaza, tried before the criminal court for domestic violence on two former companions.
“Mr. Plaza is accused of having struck, denigrated, publicly humiliated, twisted his fingers so hard that some were dislocated, and of having bitten,” listed the prosecutor in requesting this sentence.
“We must remember today who is the victim and who is the aggressor, not to make the couple a lawless zone. Mr. Plaza made a choice: that of violence to impose his will within the couple,” she declared.
In addition to the suspended prison sentence, the public prosecutor requested a fine “proportionate to the defendant’s income”: 10,000 euros to underline the “financial weight” suffered by the victims in a case where “money was a central element of the mechanisms of domination.
“Dislocations and bone tearing”
Initially a real estate agent, Plaza became a star of the small screen when the M6 channel propelled him in 2006 to the head of the shows “Research apartment or house” then “House for sale”, followed by “Apartment hunters”.
He appears for “habitual physical and/or psychological violence by a partner” between 2018 and 2022 on a partner, Amandine, and for “habitual psychological violence by a partner” on another, Paola, between 2021 and 2022. During the investigation , Amandine recounted several episodes of violence, including one in the spring of 2022: according to her story, Stéphane Plaza told her twists the fingers of one hand. An x-ray reveals two dislocations and a bone tear. She also assures that he “strangled” her with his forearm.
“I don’t control my strength because I’m dyspraxic (editor’s note: a coordination disorder) and clumsy and I don’t see that she’s in pain,” insists Stéphane Plaza on the stand, denying having strangled her. “There is a force that should not have been, it’s an unfortunate incident,” he insists. I have injured many people, even on film sets.”
Among the mistreatment denounced, Amandine described a stay in Morocco where Stéphane Plaza allegedly humiliated her with a Moroccan personality by telling her: “I brought you a woman, I’m not kidding, take her, it’s your gift.”
Why didn’t you stop this relationship? It lasted five years, asked the president. “I was in love, I worked for him, we lived in his apartment. And there were better times. So, I had a hard time getting out of all that,” says Amélie.
«Vieille pute! Baby!”
The host’s lawyers have included intimate videos of Amandine, which she sent to Plaza after their altercations. Proof, according to her defense, that she was not subjected to violence.
Paola, for her part, described to the investigators “a changing behavior” of the host: sweet words in the evening, insults in the morning… “Old whore! Bimbo!” he tells her in particular when she performs a breast augmentation to please him more. She also claims to have been bitten on a thigh and a shoulder. The two women were recognized as having total incapacity for work (ITT) for more than eight days.
This trial was postponed from August to January, at the request of the defense: their client was too “psychologically fragile” to appear. The affair began in September 2023, with the publication by the investigative site Mediapart of testimonies from three former partners.
(afp)
