French civil servant drugged us to make us urinate on ourselves, say accusers

"I was really weak. I couldn't really feel my legs any more," says Anaïs de Vos. "I was scared. I didn't know what was happening."

It was July 2011 and Anaïs, who was then 27, was being interviewed for a job at France's Ministry of Culture in Paris.

She didn't usually drink coffee but when the interviewer, a senior civil servant called Christian Nègre, offered her one, she agreed out of politeness.

He made it himself, she tells BBC Global Women, but "it tasted bad… so I drank about half".

The meeting had started in the office, but after a few minutes Nègre suggested they go outside.

As they strolled through Paris's streets, Anaïs began to feel an inexplicable and uncontrollable need to urinate.

She says she told him she needed to find a toilet urgently.

"He looked me right in the eye and said, 'Oh, do you need a wee?'

"I felt like a child. I thought it was really weird the way he looked at me, almost gleeful."

She says he directed her to the door of a storage cupboard under a bridge on the River Seine and said: "You can do it here."

Now, Anaïs is one of nearly 250 women who believe Nègre drugged them in alleged incidents between 2009 and 2018, subjecting them to what is known as chemical submission, where drugs are used to gain control over someone.

The concept of chemical submission came to prominence in France in 2024 when Gisele Pelicot's husband was found guilty of sedating her and inviting strangers to rape her while she was unconscious.

"I started to panic," Anaïs continues. "I had visions of him pushing me into the room and closing the door behind me."

Feeling it was "too strange", she insisted they move on.

They walked to the Louvre to use the toilets there, but they cost one euro and she had left her purse at the ministry's offices. Nègre told her he didn't have any cash either.

Desperate and in pain from trying not to urinate, Anaïs found a cafe that let her use their toilet.

By then, "I felt really weak physically", she says. As she approached the bathroom, she lost control and wet herself.

Women who accuse a civil servant of drugging them at job interviews share their stories

Thinking back to 2011, Anaïs gets some comfort from the fact that when she did urinate, it was out of Nègre's sight. "At least he didn't see me," she says.

"I was so grateful I was only wearing a dress," she adds, explaining it made it easier to disguise what had happened.

After three hours with Nègre, she says she "felt dizzy and drained".

She didn't get the job and had suspicions about him, but could never work out exactly what it was that had made her feel so uncomfortable.

Anaïs felt the incident damaged her self-confidence and in the years that followed, she ended up on a less ambitious career path.

Then in 2019, she received a letter from the police. When she met them, she learned they suspected she was one of almost 200 women Nègre was accused of drugging during job interviews, purportedly for roles at the ministry.

"I was shocked," she says. "But I was happy to know I wasn't crazy. Something had happened that day."

Dozens more alleged victims have since emerged.

Police believed Nègre had used diuretics, which are used to manage a number of medical conditions, including high blood pressure, and cause the body to produce excess urine.

Anaïs had had a fleeting thought the day she had met Nègre, that maybe he had slipped something into her drink, but put it aside telling herself: "It's the Ministry of Culture. It's not possible."

'Experiments P'

Anaïs says police told her they found a spreadsheet of the alleged victims on Nègre's computer, entitled Experiments P, which was how they found her.

The document, she says, noted the time the women arrived for their interviews, when the diuretic was administered, how long it took before they urinated, and what underwear they were wearing.

Looking back, Anaïs is now convinced the strange taste in the coffee Nègre made her was the diuretic.

The investigation into Nègre began in June 2018, when he was caught by a colleague taking a photograph of a woman from beneath a table, the prosecutor's office said in a statement released in February this year.

He was initially suspended from his job as regional director of cultural affairs before being sacked by the Ministry of Culture in 2019.

Prosecutors said that in 2018 he told investigators he had "imposed humiliating situations on women" during job interviews.

Many of the women say the first time they realised they may have been victims was when police contacted them.

Some came forward when they saw Anaïs and other accusers in media reports.

Nègre, who is in his 60s, is now under formal investigation on charges that include drugging, invasion of privacy and sexual assault. He is awaiting trial.

The BBC put the allegations contained in this article to Nègre through his lawyer, but he declined to comment.

Another person named in Nègre's notes was Marie-Hélène Brice. He interviewed her for a job at the Ministry of Culture in 2016 in Strasbourg, where he was then working.

She says he told her she looked stressed and suggested they take a walk outside to "calm her nerves".

But as they strolled along the canal, Marie-Hélène, like Anaïs, felt an uncontrollable need to urinate, which began to cause her pain.

She says Nègre told her that he knew of a public toilet nearby, but when they arrived at the location there was no toilet.

"I was really starting to suffer… pains to the point that I was white, pale, I had tears streaming down," she says.

Marie-Hélène says she had no choice but to urinate in public. She says Nègre offered to shield her with his jacket.

"I was terribly embarrassed," she says. "He didn't take his eyes off me."

Marie-Hélène says that for years she felt ashamed.