Volkswacht Bodensee - French prosecutors probe sex abuse accusations against top psychoanalyst

They launched the probe on Thursday after receiving six complaints against the 75-year-old media personality and screenwriter of alleged abuse between 1995 and 2005, the prosecutor's office told AFP.

Media since late January have reported that four women have accused Miller of raping them -- in two cases when they were minors -- and more than a dozen have alleged he sexually assaulted them, charges he has denied.

The allegations are just the latest against top cultural figures that have given the French #MeToo movement momentum in recent months.

Three articles, two in Elle magazine and one on investigative website Mediapart, describe alleged sexual offences by Miller from the 1990s to 2020.

They said he invited young women, including minors, to spend time with him and tried to assault them, often after giving them alcohol or hypnotising them.

Miller in a letter has rejected the accusations, saying he "never forced anyone" and there had been only relations between "consenting adults".

"I never practiced hypnosis, neither in my office with patients, nor more generally at home," he wrote.

In the first Elle article, one woman accused Miller of rape after a hypnosis session in 2004 when she was 19. Two others accused him of sexual assault.

Mediapart then reported ten more women had come forward to complain of attempted assault or assault when they were aged 16 to 21.

In a second article, Elle said 41 more women had spoken up, describing "a well-oiled predation system" under which he repeatedly targeted teenage girls and young women.

Of those, three more accused him of rape and 15 of sexual assault, it said.

One recounted him raping her with his fingers as a 15-year-old during a hypnosis session in Tunisia in 1993.

Another woman accused him of inviting her over on her 17th birthday in 2001 and forcing her to perform oral sex on him.

A now 42-year-old psychologist told Elle he raped her in 2000.

The latest accusations come after a series of similar allegations in recent months.

In one case, prosecutors are investigating claims made by actor Judith Godreche that director Benoit Jacquot, 25 years her senior, raped her in a relationship that started when she was 14.

It was a 2011 documentary by Miller, in which Jacquot boasts his relationship with her was a "transgression", that pushed her to finally speak up after decades of silence, she said.

R.Buehler--VB