Archives of the game show “Take it or leave it” broadcast on TF1 in the mid-2000s were published on X. They show Arthur, the presenter, very close to certain candidates. In these images, we see him multiplying inappropriate remarks and gestures: non-consensual kisses on the mouth, looking up the skirt, grunts full of innuendo in his ear…
The host, now 58 years old, also mimes blows with a crop on the posterior of a candidate who is visibly uncomfortable. “Finally we can see your legs,” he told her. Then when he starts breathing in her hair and being very tactile, she pushes him away. “I always liked women who resisted me a little, who spoke badly to me,” he replies.
“It was another time,” Arthur defended himself to the Parisian. I was quite close to the candidates. When they cried, men and women alike, I held them in my arms, like a family. Today, we could no longer animate in the same way.”
The host also states that “we had to do a little daily one-man show, because the show lasted 40 minutes, while the game mechanics only made up half of it.” But as noted by the historian Ludivine Bantigny at the origin of the thread which exposed this behavior, “several of his actions are legally qualified as sexual assault”.
