On Wednesday 20 November 2024, in a courtroom in Melun, south of Paris, sat Pierre Palmade, 56, once among the best-known comic performers in France, now answering for a crash in Seine-et-Marne that left three people badly hurt and cost a pregnant woman her unborn daughter. By late evening the judge had sentenced him to five years in prison, two of them to be served behind bars.
The crash and the charge
It had taken 21 months to reach this hearing, Elle noted. In February 2023 Palmade drove into a car on a road in Seine-et-Marne after a three-day chemsex party without sleep. He tested positive for cocaine and a synthetic drug, 3-MMC. The other car held Yuksel Yakut, who was driving, his six-year-old son and his pregnant sister-in-law. The woman, six months pregnant, had an emergency caesarean, and the baby, a girl she has named Solin, did not survive.
The charge was aggravated injury, which carried up to 14 years and a fine of 200,000 euros. The victims’ lawyers had asked for homicide. The court did not go that way: under a standard set by France’s Court of Cassation, a baby who never lived outside the womb does not count. The prosecutor still left no doubt about how she saw it. “We have a child who was viable and who died because of the fault of Pierre Palmade,” she said, as Elle reported her words.
What the victims said
Yakut came in leaning on a crutch, his arm in a sling. “I will never be able to get back to the way I was before,” he said through a Turkish interpreter, and he listed injuries to his intestines, liver and hips. His son’s jaw was deformed in the crash, and the boy, he said, no longer wants to go out with friends and had to repeat a school year. Télé 7 Jours added that Yakut lost the use of his right hand and that the boy, now seven, has speech difficulties.
The sister-in-law, who worked with disabled schoolchildren, said it was hard even to be in the room. Her lawyer, Mourad Battikh, argued that better legal protection for unborn babies would not threaten a woman’s right to an abortion. She hopes, she said, that Solin will be “the key that unlocks this change”.
Palmade in the dock
The comedian did not argue. “Today, I am simply flattened to see the victims in person,” he told the court, and then: “I would like to ask their forgiveness. I will ask their forgiveness all my life.” He described the three days before the crash as a spiral. “We were really like zombies, vegetables, naked and streaked with blood,” he said. Of himself he offered a blunt line: he is careful behind the wheel normally, but “dangerous on drugs”.
Prosecutor Marie-Denise Pichonnier asked for five years, three of them under probationary suspension, telling the court that one cannot be too lenient when drug-impaired driving has caused a tragedy. His lawyer pleaded against jail, worried about care in detention. “In prison you find alcohol very easily,” she said.
The judge sentenced him to five years, two of them to be served, with a deferred committal order. The presiding judge told him he would soon be summoned by the Bordeaux prosecutor, who would set the date and the prison.
Sources
- French comedian faces victims of drug-fuelled car crash – France 24 (AFP)
- Pierre Palmade condamne a 5 ans de prison – Elle
- Pierre Palmade condamne a cinq ans de prison dont deux ans ferme – Tele 7 Jours
