Anais de Vos says, "I felt very weak. I felt like I couldn't feel my legs anymore. I was scared. I didn't understand what was happening."
The matter is of July 2011. At that time, 27-year-old Anais had gone to Paris for a job interview at the French Ministry of Culture.
She didn't usually drink coffee, but when the senior government official conducting the interview, Christian Negre, offered her coffee, she graciously accepted it.
"He made that coffee himself, but it tasted bad," Anais tells BBC Global Woman. So I drank only about half."
The meeting started in the office, but after a few minutes Negre suggested going outside.
While walking on the streets of Paris, Anais began feeling a sudden and persistent urge to urinate.
She says she told Negre they needed to find a restroom immediately.
"He looked straight into my eyes and said, 'Oh, you have to pee'?"
“I felt like a child. It was very strange for him to look at me in that way, as if he was almost happy with the situation."
She says Negre led her to the door of a storeroom under a bridge over the Seine River and said, "You can pee here."
Now Anais is among about 250 women who believe Negre drugged them. In the alleged incidents that took place between 2009 and 2018, women were kept in a condition known as 'chemical submission'. That means giving intoxicants to a person to gain control over him.
'Chemical submission' became widely known in France in 2024, when Gisele Pellico's husband was found guilty of drugging her and allowing strangers to rape her.
“I was nervous,” she says. "I started having thoughts in my mind that he would push me into that room and close the door behind me."
They found this very strange, so Anais insisted that they move on from there.
He reached the Louvre to use the toilet, but there he had to pay one euro and his purse was left in the ministry office. Negre also said that he did not have cash.
Despite the pain and discomfort of trying to hold back urine, Anais finally found a café where she was allowed to use the toilet.
"By then I was feeling very weak physically," she says. While walking to the bathroom, she lost control and her clothes got wet.
Recalling the 2011 incident, Anais finds some solace in the fact that Negre was not watching her while she was urinating. She says, "At least he didn't see me."
Anais says, "I was very thankful that I was only wearing a dress." He says that this made it easier to hide what had happened.
After spending nearly three hours with Negre, she says she felt dizzy and exhausted.
He did not get the job. She certainly had some doubts about Negre, but she never understood exactly what it was about that meeting that made her feel so uncomfortable.
Anais felt that this incident damaged her self-confidence. In the years that followed, his career progressed in a direction that was less than his initial ambitions.
Then in 2019 he received a letter from the police. When she met with the police, she learned that they suspected she was one of approximately 200 women whom Negre had allegedly drugged during job interviews. These interviews were allegedly for jobs in the Ministry of Culture.
"I was shocked but glad to know I wasn't crazy," she says.
After this dozens of more women came forward.
Police believed that Negre had used diuretics. These medications are used to treat many medical conditions, including high blood pressure, and they cause the body to produce excessive amounts of urine.
On the day of her meeting with Negre, Anais had for a moment thought that perhaps he might have spiked her drink, but she had dismissed the thought, saying that such a thing could not happen in the Ministry of Culture.
Anais says police told them a spreadsheet of alleged women was found on Negre's computer, named 'Experiments P'. Through this the police reached them.
According to him, in this document, information like the time the women came for the interview, the time they were given diuretics, the time it took for them to urinate and the type of underwear they were wearing were recorded.
Now looking back, Anais is convinced that the strange taste of Negre's coffee was due to the same diuretic.
The investigation against Negre started in June 2018. He was then caught by a co-worker taking photographs of a woman under her desk, the prosecutor's office said in a statement released in February this year.
After this, he was first suspended from the post of Regional Director of Cultural Affairs and in 2019 he was dismissed by the Ministry of Culture.
According to prosecutors, Negre told investigators in 2018 that he had "put women in humiliating situations" during job interviews.
Many women say that they first came to know that this had happened to them when the police contacted them.
Some women came forward when they saw Anais and other accusers in media reports.
Negre, now in his 60s, is now being formally investigated on charges including drug abuse, invasion of privacy and sexual harassment. He is awaiting trial.
The BBC contacted Negre's lawyer to comment on the allegations made in the article, but he declined to comment.
Another woman recorded in Nègre's notes was Marie-Hélène Brice. In 2016, Negre interviewed him for a job at the Ministry of Culture in Strasbourg. He was working there at that time.
She says Negre told her she appeared stressed and suggested she take a walk outside to "calm her nerves."
But while walking along the canal, Marie-Hélène, like Anais, began to have a sudden and persistent urge to urinate. Gradually, due to this he also started having pain.
She says Negre told them he knew of a public restroom nearby, but when they got there there was no restroom.
She says, "I started feeling really bad. The pain had increased so much that my face had turned white, I had become pale and tears were flowing from my eyes."
According to Marie-Helen, she had no option but to urinate in a public place. He says Negre offered to cover him with his jacket.
"I was so embarrassed," she says. "He wouldn't take his eyes off me."
Marie-Helen says that for years she felt ashamed about this incident.
Like Anais, the police also contacted her and told that she was among the women with whom Negre had done this. "It was a big shock for me," she says.
Marie-Helen says that apart from mental distress, this incident has also given her health problems related to urination.
She says that even though this incident may not seem like the cases of sexual harassment that people usually think of, she has no doubt about what happened to her.
“I was attacked, I was drugged, I was poisoned. But to me this is clearly sexual harassment."
The issue of 'chemical submission' has also been raised by French MP Sandrine Josso.
She became a leading voice on the issue when French senator Joël Gerio was convicted this year of adding chemicals to JoJo's drinks with the intention of sexually assaulting them.
Josso argues that France has for a long time not taken enough steps to help such women and take action against those who drug them.
She was also instrumental in implementing a pilot program started this year. Under this, women who suspect that they have been given intoxicants can send their blood, urine or hair samples to the lab for testing without filing a formal complaint with the police.
"People are becoming active now, more victims are coming forward and filing more complaints," Joso told BBC Global Women. This is quite important."
But it also has some limitations. At that time, Anais, Marie-Hélène and many other women had no idea that they had been given any intoxicating substance. If the drug is not tested immediately after administration, it may not be detected in blood and urine samples.
These substances can be detected in hair for long periods of time, but over time it becomes difficult to determine when the drug was administered.
Using diuretics in this way is "very unusual", according to Professor Jean-Claude Alvarez, who is running the pilot program at the Raymond-Poincaré AP-HP hospital.
He says that in his 26 years of career as a toxicologist, he has never seen such a case before.
400 types of substances are tested regularly in the lab. "Now in France we are also looking at diuretics," he says.
It has now been 15 years since Anais met Negre and seven years since she first talked to the police.
Like many other complainants, he is puzzled as to why the case against Negre is taking so long to reach court.
Meanwhile, according to women's rights organization Foundation des Dames, which is helping around 30 affected women, the alleged accused is still working in the human resources sector.
"Everything is upsetting and I'm angry at the way we're being treated," says Anais, now 42.
She says that she spoke to the police for the first time in 2019, but after that she did not know anything about the case till 2023, even though she had emailed the police several times.
She says, "For four years I lived alone with the fact that I was a victim. I didn't know what to do. I was very angry with the justice system."
"As a victim, I have to prove how it affected me, go to a psychiatrist, and write specific notes," she says.
UN Women's Kalliopi Mingeru told the BBC that governments, police and justice systems needed to do more to tackle drug-related sexual assaults.
She said authorities were facing serious challenges and delays in investigating alleged sexual assault cases were ruining women's lives.
The BBC sought feedback from the French police, judiciary and government on these criticisms of the way the case was handled, but did not receive any response.
Marie-Helen remained silent about this incident for a long time, but later she stopped feeling ashamed.
"I don't need to hide myself. I'm a victim," she says.
“It was important for me to speak out publicly because it allowed some of the victims to recognize themselves in the story, realize that they too were victims, and file complaints.”
“It is important to have your say in the world we live in. It's important to talk about gender and sexual violence."
