Former Ecology Minister Nikola Ilo has revealed that many women are going to accuse him of sexual assault and rape, something he denies, while announcing that he is leaving “public life for good”.
“I will resign from the presidency (honorary) of my institution, in order to protect it from the stigma (…) I am leaving public life permanently because I am disgusted,” the former presenter said in statements on television. “Why perpetuate a reputation that makes me suffer the worst a man can suffer?” he wondered.
“I am stepping down from my commitments, I will not talk again, I paid a heavy price,” added Ilo, who was for 15 months (May 2017-August 2018) Minister of Ecological Transition in the government of President Emanuel Macron.
Speaking yesterday, Ilo caught the broadcast of a documentary in which women accuse him of “sexual assault and rape”, events that date back to 1989.
“I did not do these things, these allegations are false. “I never forced anyone,” he insisted, denouncing “a system where reason has been lost” and “a justice done to the television set.”
According to the former minister, four or five women are speaking in this documentary, except for the granddaughter of former French President François Mitterrand, who is known since 2018 to have filed a rape lawsuit against him. At the time, Ebdo magazine (no longer in circulation) had published a controversial investigation into a rape lawsuit ten years earlier. This case had been filed. Shortly before the issue of the magazine was released, Ilo once again denied these “infamous rumors” on television.
Prosecutors, like Ilo himself, confirmed that a lawsuit was filed against him in 2008 but the case was dropped without a follow-up because the offense dates back to 1997 and was statute-barred.
In 1990, Nicolas Ilo founded the Ushuaia Foundation, which was later renamed the Nicolas Ilo Foundation for Nature and Man. -Lope Cretien
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