French culture min. admits paying for sex

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:37:54 GMT

http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=108320&sectionid=351020603

The scandal surrounding the French culture minister takes a new turn as he confesses to paying for prostitution but denies pedophilia.

In a televised Thursday night interview, Frédéric Mitterrand said that during his trips to Thailand to cruise the "slave markets" and brothels for boys and paid sexual encounters, adding the boys in question were not minors but "youths".

Frédéric Mitterrand, the openly homosexual nephew of former French president François Mitterrand, added that homosexuals call all men "boys".

In a 2005 autobiographical book, however, the minister who is now facing public disgrace writes that he got "into the habit of paying for boys".

"The profusion of young, very attractive and immediately available boys put me in a state of desire that I no longer needed to restrain or hide," he says in a passage of the book called "La mauvaise vie" or "The Bad Life".

"All these rituals of the market for youths, the slave market excite me enormously… One could judge this abominable spectacle from a moral standpoint but it pleases me beyond the reasonable," he adds.

The 62 year-old Mitterand, claimed that although he described them as "young boys", he went to Thailand to have sex with prostitutes his "own age".

Paying for prostitution is not illegal in France.

During the interview, Mitterand said that he condemns "sex tourism", and called it "a disgrace".

"The book is in no way an apology for sex tourism, even if one chapter is a journey through that hell, with all the fascination that hell can inspire," he said.

Mitterrand's book came back to haunt him after he offered an spirited defense of filmmaker Roman Polanski, who is in Swiss custody after years of running from US authorities for a guilty plea he gave to charges of raping a 13 year-old girl.

Mitterand has described Polanski's arrest in Switzerland and possible extradition to the US as "terrible". He has also stressed that he would not set down because of his comments about the filmmaker.

Despite strong calls for his resignation or removal from both lefties and righties, members of Nicolas Sarkozy's inner circle have stepped up in Mitterand's defense.

Earlier this week, a top aide to the French president, Henri Guaino, told France 2 television that the media scandal was "pathetic", arguing that there was no need for Mitterrand to leave the cabinet.

"When there is a controversy as pathetic as this, with so much delay, I don't think there should be such drastic consequences," Guaino said.

The French far-right Front National has launched an online petition to call for Mitterand's resignation. The Socialist opposition party has also called it appalling that an abusive pedophile was serving as a cabinet minister.

"I find it shocking that a man can justify sex tourism under the cover of a literary account," a top Socialist figure, Benoît Hamon, said, according to a report posted by The Daily Telegraph.

Mitterrand has responded to the attacks by saying that it is "honor" for him to be dragged through "the mud by the National Front."