PARIS — French newspaper Le Monde reported this week some of the specific allegations against one of the country’s leading adult sites and its owner, in what the media has dubbed “the affaire Jacquie et Michel.”
On Friday, June 17, Jacquie et Michel’s owner, Michel Piron, was arrested, charged and then released under judicial supervision.
Sources familiar with the company told XBIZ that, upon his release on Friday night or Saturday morning, Piron resigned from his position with the site.
A few days earlier, on June 14, Piron had been interrogated along with his wife and three other persons, and questioned by judicial investigators as part of a criminal investigation, led by a Paris prosecutor, which had started two years prior.
Some of those charged alongside Piron remain in police custody.
This week, Le Monde was given access to the police investigation and also to some of the women who have made allegations against Piron and Jacquie et Michel.
The newspaper published the new material in an article by reporters Samuel Laurent and Lorraine de Foucherunder, headlined “Sexual Violence in Porn: the ‘Jacquie et Michel System’ as Told by Its Victims.”
Allegations of Deception and Coercion
The article recounts the allegations made by four women, identified only by pseudonyms.
Corinne is described as an account assistant from the south of France who says she agreed to take part in a shoot in 2013 in Paris with a man she had met online and was dating. Corinne alleges that she only agreed to participate in “traditional” sex with her boyfriend, but when she arrived in Paris she was taken to a hotel and made to perform an anal-vaginal gangbang with strangers.
Jessica is described as a girl with an extremely troubled background, who says that she signed up to shoot porn for a website and ended up with a producer who said he worked for Jacquie et Michel, offered her MDMA and shot her in a variety of sex acts. Then, she said, she became a recruiter for Jacquie et Michel. She now regrets this and says she was coerced into the sex and into her role as a “pimp.”
Valerie told Le Monde that in 2009 a photographer/producer recruited her for Jacquie et Michel, "broke her mental health" and coerced her into increasingly violent and degrading shoots.
Fabienne said she shot “numerous” scenes for the site, all of which end with her smiling and saying the site’s trademark line, “Thank you, Jacquie and Michel!” She now contends that she was coerced into those performances and the end-of-video endorsements.
Jacquie et Michel's Lawyers Respond
Piron and the others have now been accused by the authorities of rape and pimping for an unspecified number of incidents dating from 2009 until 2015.
Corinne alleges that Michel Piron himself was on set when the alleged abuses happened. One of Piron’s lawyers, Yves Levano, told Le Monde that “the plaintiff is not telling the truth. That will be proven.”
Another of Piron’s lawyers, Nicolas Cellupica, told Le Monde that his client “has always been on the side of the victims if actresses have suffered acts of sexual violence of which he is completely ignorant.”
Counsel for Ares, parent company of Jacquie et Michel, told Le Monde that “at some of the early video shoots, Michel Piron would go to some sets to understand the product and to refine the concept.” However, the lawyer insisted, the company is “merely the broadcaster of the video.”
The Role of 'Sex Work Abolitionist' Organizations
The investigation into Jacquie et Michel originated in July 2020, following media coverage of a nonfiction book titled “Judy, Lola, Sofia and Me” by journalist Robin d’Angelo, who claimed to have “infiltrated” Jacquie et Michel sets and alleged on-set abuses.
Material collected by d’Angelo, alongside other testimony, was brought to the authorities by three “sex work abolitionist” groups: Movement of the Nest, Dare Feminism! and The Indignant Women.
Piron, 64, is a former high school teacher who, according to well-publicized company lore, started a personal site around the year 2000 that featured nudes he had received from a supposed online chat pal from the U.S. named “Jackie.”
The Jacquie et Michel site was launched in 2002 by Piron and his life partner, a fellow teacher named Araceli, from their home on the outskirts of the small city of Tarbes in southwest France, not far from the Pyrenees, the Spanish border and the Catholic pilgrimage site of Lourdes.
The small business grew to include around 40 employees, including family, and was considered until the current scandal “a success story à la française” by the press. The small-town operation managed to challenge the traditional French adult market dominated by Paris-based Dorcel, both with its signature “pro-am” content and with higher-end offerings through its Jacquie et Michel Elite imprint.
Canal+ Drops Jacquie et Michel Content
Since the influential "establishment" newspaper Le Monde published numerous articles slanted to persuade the public of Piron’s guilt and a supposedly nefarious “Jacquie et Michel system” of recruitment and production, fallout from the media scandal has included French premium television channel Canal+ dropping Jacquie et Michel content on June 17. The company had signed a lucrative broadcasting deal with Canal+ in 2020.
Also on June 17, an inquest was opened against Piron and entrusted to the investigative arm of the Paris police.
The same police branch is currently in charge of the case against independent adult producers Pascal OP and Mat HDX, aka Hadix, for what is known as “the French Bukkake affaire,” in which around 50 women were deposed regarding accusations of rape and human trafficking, and which has already resulted in around 10 arrests.
A full-blown media panic around “pornography” has been taken up by mainstream media organizations, which have consistently amplified d’Angelo’s “immersive” investigations, the Pascal OP/Mat HDX case and the debate over forcing tube sites to implement age verification.
This culminated in a four-part report by Le Monde on December 15, 2021, sensationally titled “The Multi-Tentacle Investigation That Makes French Porn Tremble.”