"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.

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,

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.

Like Anaïs, she was also contacted by police who told her she was among Nègre's alleged victims. "It was a very big shock," she adds.

Marie-Hélène says that as well as psychological distress, she has also been left with urinary problems.

She explains that while the events might not fit the pattern of what people usually think of in cases of sexual assault, she has no doubts about what happened to her: "I have been attacked, I have been intoxicated, I have been poisoned, but for me it is a sexual assault, clearly."

The issue of chemical submission has been picked up by French MP Sandrine Josso. She became a leading campaigner after French senator Joel Guerriau was found guilty this year of spiking her drink with ecstasy in order to sexually assault her.

Josso argues that for too long France has not done enough to support women who have been drugged and prosecute offenders.

She was behind the introduction this year of a pilot programme where women who suspect they have been drugged can take samples of blood, urine or hair to a lab for testing, without having to file a formal complaint with police.

"People are mobilising, victims are reporting more, filing more complaints, and that's important," Josso tells BBC Global Women.

But there are limitations. Anaïs, Marie-Hélène and many other alleged victims of Nègre did not suspect they had been drugged - and unless testing takes place very soon after drugging, substances won't show up in blood and urine samples.

Drugs may be detectable for longer in hair, but as time passes it becomes harder to pinpoint when they were administered.

The use of diuretics in this way is "very unusual" according to Prof Jean-Claude Alvarez, who runs the pilot at the Raymond-Poincaré AP-HP Hospital. He says he has never seen anything like it in 26 years as a toxicologist.

The lab routinely tests for 400 substances and "now, in France, we are looking for diuretics", he adds.

It is now 15 years since Anaïs's encounter with Nègre and seven years since she first spoke to police.

Like many of the other accusers, she is frustrated at the length of time it is taking for Nègre's case to come to court.

Meanwhile, the alleged perpetrator has continued to work in human resources, according to Fondation des Femmes, a women's rights group that is supporting about 30 of the women affected.

"Everything is unsettling and I am angry at how we are treated," says Anaïs, who is now 42 years old.

She says she first spoke to police in 2019, but then heard nothing about the case until 2023, despite emailing them many times.

"For four years, I was alone with the knowledge that I was a victim. I didn't know what to do," she says. "I am very angry with the justice system."

Marie-Hélène describes this waiting as "secondary victimisation".

"As a victim, I have to prove the impact, go to a psychiatrist, write specific notes," she says.

The delays to the case have made what happened harder to bear.

"We do not necessarily feel [we are] completely taken seriously," Marie-Hélène says.

Kalliopi Mingeirou from UN Women told the BBC that governments, police and justice systems needed to do more to tackle drug-facilitated sexual assault, and that authorities were facing "very serious challenges" and delays in cases of alleged abuse are "destroying women's lives".

The BBC asked the French police, judiciary and government to respond to the criticisms of their handling of the case, but they did not respond.

For a long time, Marie-Hélène was silent until she stopped feeling shame.

"I don't have to hide myself - I am a victim," she says.

"It is important for me to speak publicly because it allowed some victims to recognise themselves, to discover they were a victim and to file a complaint in turn.

"Speaking out is necessary in the world in which we live, it is important to talk about sexist and sexual violence."

(BBC)

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