Journalist Marie Portolano acquitted in her defamation trial against Pierre Ménès, who will soon be tried for sexual assault

The acquittal was expected: neither Pierre Ménès nor his lawyer, who were absent, had pleaded before the 17th chamber of the Paris judicial court on September 7. They had tried, in vain, to obtain a referral due to a medical appointment. The defamation trial that the former Canal+ football columnist had brought against Marie Portolano therefore took place in the sole presence of the journalist and her counsel, Me Christophe Bigot, who had free rein to defend themselves. Like them, the court ruled this Wednesday that the incriminated passages from the book Je suis la femme du plateau, published in March 2024 by Stock editions, did not amount to defamation. The boss of Stock editions, Manuel Carcassonne, was also released.

In one of the two passages attacked, Marie Portolano denounces the actions of Pierre Ménès during their time together at Canal+, at the end of the 2010s. Both then worked for the show Canal Football Club. “It was said of him that he had a “right to control”. In fact, he did what he pleased, without ever being reprimanded. In addition to humiliation, all genders combined, he allowed himself to do whatever he wanted to the women around him. To touch who he wanted where he wanted, with the consent not of the people concerned obviously, but of those who could have easily stopped him, his hierarchical superiors for example, always witnesses to these actions,” she writes in particular.

Marie Portolano had already addressed these attacks in March 2021 in her documentary broadcast on Canal+, I am not a slut, I am a journalist, which deals with sexism in the world of sports journalism. Pierre Ménès left Canal+ after the revelation of sequences incriminating him, in particular one where the journalist confronted him for a skirt raised in 2016 in front of the CFC audience. These sequences were cut during the editing of the documentary at the request of the encrypted channel.

“Either he was touching my breasts or he was touching my butt”

In her book, Marie Portolano returns to this confrontation by affirming, without expressly naming Pierre Ménès: “He admits that he did it.” A sentence that the ex-columnist had also attacked for defamation. Pierre Ménès, 63, has always held a grudge against Marie Portolano for the documentary. In a video posted on his YouTube channel a few years ago, he accused the journalist of having “broken [his] career”.

At the hearing on September 7, Marie Portolano, 40 years old and now presenter of La Maison des Maternelles on France 2, spoke at length about the attacks she says she suffered at Canal+, the silence of management at the time of the events, and the “very masculinist” atmosphere that reigned on the sets, before the MeToo wave. “I adopted a strategy of avoidance, because when I was next to him, either he touched my breasts or he touched my buttocks,” she detailed. His lawyer, Me Bigot, had insisted on the numerous corroborating testimonies of employees or ex-employees of Canal+ which, according to him, attest that Pierre Ménès “considers the women who surround him as things”.