“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.
Grand Est Region & Bas-Rhin Prefect
Nearly 250 women accuse Nègre of drugging them between 2009 and 2018
“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.
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.
