The quarrel too many. This Friday, June 2, Geoffroy Lejeune, the media editorial director of Current values, leaves the headquarters on rue Georges-Bizet, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, with a ban on entering the premises again. The journalist and claimed friend of Eric Zemmour has just been laid off, and to announce it to the members present. Here he is summoned Monday, June 12 for an interview prior to sanction that can go as far as dismissal. A formal step which should allow the person concerned to explain the facts of which he is accused, but which should most probably lead to his departure, according to several sources in the editorial staff and the hierarchy of the magazine.
In a climate tense by the showdown between Geoffroy Lejeune and the owner of Current values, the Franco-Lebanese shipowner Iskandar Safa, the triggering event of the rupture took place on Wednesday, in the middle of an editorial conference. Among the journalists, an unusual face appears: that of the new president of the magazine’s parent company, Jean-Louis Valentin, who arrived three days earlier, Monday, May 29. This ex-president of the Republicans of the Cotentin agglomeration, a former executive of the French Football Federation where the Normandy Mechanical Constructions shipyard is located, which belongs to Iskandar Safa, wishes to attend his first editorial meeting. But the tone would quickly rise between the two men. “It’s my writing, you have nothing to do there. You leave ! »would have in substance launched Geoffroy Lejeune, editorial director since 2016, towards the new president and director of the publication, according to the account of an internal source. “You are not on a CNews set”would have retorted the newcomer, adds another.
The sudden arrival of Jean-Louis Valentin was not to please Geoffroy Lejeune. As revealed The letter a on May 29, it follows the dismissal of Charles-Antoine Rougier, who has been in charge since last fall of ensuring that the editorial line of the weekly moves away from the extreme right to get closer to the classic right, while that the magazine covered the presidential campaign by supporting Eric Zemmour, until a large meeting organized at the Palais des sports in March 2022 favorable to the polemicist. A mission that Charles-Antoine Rougier would not have succeeded in carrying out sufficiently well.
For more than a year, the shareholder Iskandar Safa reminded each quarterly supervisory board that he wanted the magazine not to “roll” not for a candidate, according to one participant. Same requests within the editorial commission chaired by Charles Villeneuve, close to the billionaire. In vain. “Geoffroy, he doesn’t care. He continued to right-hand something already very very right ”confides a member of the management of Valmonde, in reference – among other things – to the conviction for public insult of a racist nature of the weekly, which had depicted the deputy Danièle Obono as a slave, in August 2020. Before the eruption of Eric Zemmour in the political arena, the radical right magazine was already criticized for its cover favoring Marion Maréchal, niece of Marine Le Pen, whom Geoffroy Lejeune describes as a “dear friend” since adolescence, even if he denies favoring it.
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