Almost 250 women sustain they were targeted by a civil servant at a French government ministry, who allegedly secretly drugged them with diuretics during job interviews and then led them to public places, waiting until they could no longer control their need to urinate, watching and recording the result.

The allegations against Christian Nègre, a senior official at France’s Ministry of Culture, relate to incidents between 2009 and 2018. The man, now in his 60s, is under formal investigation on charges including administering substances, invasion of privacy and sexual assault, and is awaiting trial.

Two of the women accusing him, Anaïs de Vos and Marie-Hélène Brice, described their experiences to the BBC, and explained how it took them years to discover they were not the only victims.

“I couldn’t feel my legs any more”

It was July 2011 when Anaïs de Vos, then 27, walked through the door of the French Ministry of Culture in Paris for a job interview. The man interviewing her was Christian Nègre, a senior official. He offered her a coffee. She did not usually drink coffee but accepted out of politeness, since he had made it himself. “It tasted bad, so I drank about half,” she recalls.

The interview began in his office, but a few minutes later Nègre suggested they continue with a walk outside. As they walked through the streets of Paris, de Vos began to feel something she could not explain. “I was really weak. I couldn’t feel my legs properly. I was scared. I didn’t know what was happening.”

At the same time, she felt a sudden, uncontrollable need to urinate. She told him she urgently needed to find a toilet. “He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Oh, do you need a wee?'” His manner made her feel even more uncomfortable. “I felt like a child. I thought the way he was looking at me was very strange, almost as if he was enjoying it.”

According to her account, Nègre led her towards the door of a storage space under a bridge on the Seine. “You can do it here,” he told her. De Vos panicked. “I had images in my head of him pushing me into the room and shutting the door behind me.”

She refused and insisted they carry on. They headed towards the Louvre so she could use the toilets there, but entry cost a euro and she had left her wallet at the ministry. Nègre told her he had no money on him either.

By now the 27 year old was desperate, and in pain from trying to hold on. She eventually found a café that let her use its toilet, but did not make it in time. “I already felt very weak physically,” she recalls. Just before reaching the toilet, she lost control and wet herself.

Fifteen years on, she finds some comfort in the fact that this did not happen in front of the man she accuses. “At least he didn’t see it,” she says. After around three hours in his company, she felt dizzy and exhausted.

De Vos had left that interview with the sense that something very petrurbing had happened, without being able to explain what. For a moment she had wondered whether something had been put in her coffee, but quickly dismissed the thought. “It’s the Ministry of Culture. That’s not possible,” she had told herself.

The incident, she says, affected her confidence, and in the years that followed she pursued a less ambitious career path. In 2019, she received a letter from police. Officers told her they believed she was one of the almost 200 women Nègre was suspected of having drugged during job interviews. Since then, dozens more women have come forward as possible victims, with the total now approaching 250. “I was shocked,” she says. “But relieved to learn I wasn’t going mad. Something really had happened that day.”

The “experiments” file and the exposure of his campaign

Even more chilling, according to de Vos, was what police told her about Nègre’s computer. Investigators found a file titled “experiments,” in which women considered likely drugging victims had been logged.

According to what de Vos told the BBC, the file recorded each woman’s arrival time for interview, the moment she was given the diuretic, how long it took her to urinate, and even the type of underwear she was wearing.

She is now convinced that the odd taste of the coffee Nègre gave her came from the diuretic. The investigation into him began in June 2018, after a colleague spotted him photographing a woman under a table, according to a statement from prosecutors. He was initially suspended from his post as regional director of cultural affairs, and in 2019 was dismissed from the Ministry of Culture.

Prosecutors say that in 2018 he told investigators he had “subjected women to humiliating situations” during job interviews.

“He didn’t take his eyes off me, it was clearly sexual assault”

Marie-Hélène Brice’s account is similar. Her name, too, was found in Nègre’s notes, according to the BBC. He had interviewed her for a post at the Ministry of Culture in Strasbourg in 2016.

Brice says Nègre told her she looked stressed and suggested they take a walk by the canal to “relax.” During the walk, she also began to feel an uncontrollable need to urinate. The pressure developed into severe pain.

Nègre, she says, told her he knew of a public toilet nearby, but when they arrived there was none. “I’d really started to suffer. I was in so much pain that I’d gone pale and tears were running from my eyes.” She was eventually left with no choice but to urinate in public. Nègre offered to shield her with his jacket. “I was terribly ashamed,” she says. “He didn’t take his eyes off me.”

For years she carried the shame of what had happened. Like de Vos, she only learned the truth when police contacted her. Brice says that, beyond the psychological toll, she has also had urinary problems ever since.

Although what she describes does not match the picture most people have in mind when they hear the term “sexual assault,” she has no doubt about what happened to her. “I was attacked, drugged, poisoned. For me it’s clearly sexual assault,” she says.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in 26 years”

The case now forms part of a wider debate that has opened up in France around so called “chemical submission,” the use of substances to gain control over another person.

The issue came to the forefront of French public life after the case of Gisèle Pelicot, whose husband was convicted in 2024 of drugging her and inviting strangers to rape her while she was unconscious.

This year, a pilot scheme was introduced allowing women who suspect they have been drugged to submit blood, urine or hair samples for laboratory testing, without first having to file a formal complaint with police.

Nègre’s case, however, has an important distinguishing feature: many of the women had not even realised they might have been drugged. Professor Jean Claude Alvarez, who runs the pilot scheme at the Raymond Poincaré hospital, part of the AP-HP public hospital network in Paris, describes the use of diuretics in this way as “very unusual.”

As he explains, he has encountered nothing similar in the 26 years he has worked as a toxicologist. The lab routinely tests samples for around 400 substances. “Now, in France, we’re testing for diuretics too,” he notes.