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Names of lecherous French MPs included on 'blacklist' for women to avoid

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Names of lecherous French MPs included on 'blacklist' for women to avoid
Photo: AFP

A former parliamentary assistant has revealed that there is a "blacklist" of lecherous male French MPs that women working in the National Assembly know to avoid.

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Marine Tondelier, aged 31, told France 2 that this "blacklist" - while not written down - is passed on among females colleagues so that they know which men to avoid being alone with. 
 
Her version was backed up a former minister Cécile Duflot, who also started out as parliamentary assistant.
 
"There are names that circulate between colleagues because we know that we should not take the elevator with them. There's a risk they will stick a hand on your buttocks," Duflot said.
 
 
Fed up with bawdy remarks and wandering hands, dozens of female journalists signed the petition.
 
"Get your paws off me!" read the front page of the Liberation newspaper, where 40 female political reporters detailed sexist and lewd behaviour suffered while working in the corridors of power.
 
 
READ ALSO: 
Women in Paris tell their stories of being groped, pestered and sexually harassed
Photo: Jean Francois Gornet/Flickr
 
According to Tondelier, now the green party European representative for Hénin-Beaumont in the northern Pas-de-Calais region, women working at the National Assembly are regularly subjected to sexist remarks. 
 
"Everyday, you get comments on your outfit, the makeup you're wearing, the fact that you're 'very nice'," she said. 
 
And she believes this constitutes "sexual violence".
 
Her account comes just a few days after another ex-parliamentary assistant accused the La Republique en Marche! MP Christophe Arend of sexual harassment. 
 
Arend fiercely denies the accusations, calling them slanderous. 
 
And on Friday, 28-year-old French writer Ariane Fornia, claimed in French newspaper l'Express that she was sexually assaulted by one of ex-French president François Mitterrand's minister's Pierre Joxe.
 
Fornia, daughter of an ex-minister to ex-French president Nicolas Sarkozy said that when she was 20, Joxe groped her at a classical music concert. 
 
He has vehemently denied her accusation.

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