[imagesource: Sophia Martinez]

The town of Agde on the Mediterranean coast, with its beautiful sandy beaches and year-round sun, has a solid reputation for its wild sex parties, unofficially known as Europe’s capital for swingers.

Tens of thousands of couples head to the town from across Europe every year to swap partners and while that might make for some loaded rumours, the town is reeling from an entirely different kind of scandal right now.

The mayor of Agde is behind bars following the bizarre accusation that he was lavishing gifts on a local clairvoyant, at the taxpayer’s expense, to speak to his dead relatives.

The town’s 55-year-old mayor, Gilles d’Ettore, a former secret service officer and police officer, is now in jail while under judicial investigation along with his fortune teller, Sophia Martinez. Martinez faces charges of embezzling the mayor, while he himself is accused of corruption and squandering local citizen’s money on her.

According to reports, d’Ettore asked Martinez to make contact with his deceased father, who died in 1996, which she apparently was able to do, even mimicking his voice with her extraordinary ventriloquist skills in order to keep the con alive.

The rouse went on for four years with Martinez regularly impersonating d’Ettore’s father’s voice both in person and over the phone, per the BBC:

He received thousands of mysterious calls from “voices” of the dead including angels, some of them urging the mayor to help the fortune teller.

This quickly turned into corruption, with the mayor allegedly pouring public funds into lavish holidays for Ms Martinez and her family, including to Polynesia and Thailand. The “voices” allegedly also persuaded him to hire several members of her family to work for the town council.

Her manipulative tactics even paid for her wedding renovations to her home, which local businesses with connections to the mayor did for free out of fear of losing future contracts with him.

Image: X

The mayor’s lawyer Jean Marc Darrigade said “It’s a crazy story”.

“It’s incredible because you have a man in politics, mayor and former MP who is very intelligent. And you discover that a man like that can be manipulated by a woman.”

“This is a woman who came into his life and said I can speak to your deceased father. She found a mental weakness in him and exploited it for personal gain. It took a long time before he accepted he had been conned.”

Naturally, Martinez’s lawyer, Luc Abratkiewicz, has a different view.

“She has admitted betraying the mayor’s confidence but it’s not a case of manipulation because she has owned up to what she did and other clients including doctors and architects said she had mystical powers,” he says.

“She revealed details about their lives that no-one else knew about.”

Meanwhile, locals say it all comes down to sex in a town with a lot of it already.

One local chuckled: “For me, sex is at the heart of the scandal. Where there is money involved, then it means sex is part of it too.”

“They kind of go together.”

The whistle was blown on the bizarre story by d’Ettore’s estranged wife, Geraldine, who told the police that the mayor was ‘bewitched’ by Martinez in October 2023.

He was arrested in March and has been asked to resign.

Both d’Ettore and Martinez, a mother of six, are being held in custody while they await trial due to fears regarding witness tampering.

[source:bbc]