Mister France Grand-Est dropped of his title for fraud

It was a dramatic turn of events this morning in the Ardennes. The entire election of Mister France Grand-Est was outright invalidated. It was our colleagues from L’union Ardennais who gave us the scoop this morning.

The first competition to appoint the Grand Est representative took place in Vrigne les Bois, near Charleville-Mézières on December 11, at the same time as the long-awaited Miss France contest. Of the seven contestants, Arthur Badureau from Sedan was elected. The 18-year-old has just left high school, but is already working as a photo model. Already titled in another committee earlier in the year, the athlete naturally entered the first male beauty pageant in France.

In the edition of December 17, 2021, L’union Ardennais revealed that the results were purely and simply invalidated by the national office, chaired by François Deixonne. According to certain evidence communicated to the organization, the delegate Maïté Hutzincker would have communicated the quizz of general knowledge to certain finalists justifying these acts by the difficulty of the questions for young adults. This reason is debated since most of the candidates considered them relatively simple. In the copy we were able to have, the questions concerned the name of the highest peak in the French Pyrenees (Vignemale), the name of the last two presidents of the United States (Donald Trump and Joe Biden) or the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the end, in our opinion, a very common and very usual test in this environment.

This fraud was revealed to the general public by Eric, an unsuccessful candidate, and the evidence was allegedly stolen by a third party from Delegate Maïté’s phone on election night. We discover that she sent this general knowledge test to some candidates, her favorites, including Arthur, the new winner. This general knowledge test allowed him to get the mark of 18/20, earning him valuable points for the victory. Contacted by us, Arthur admits the facts, but adds that he was “not aware of the gravity of this act”, and now prefers to quickly forget about this incident and turn this sad page of his life.

That same evening, Eric, a contestant for the election, published a ten-minute story in which he described his side of the story and exposed the deception. Through a succession of small details, he would have realized the “trickery” and the cheating within the regional committee and did not want to be silent.

For the moment, the runner-ups are not officially impeached, but the president of the national organization, François Deixonne, has decided not to allow any of them to participate in the final of Mister France on January 22 in Paris. There will therefore be no representative for the Grand Est region. The delegate facing this scandal resigned from her functions and filed a complaint for data theft.

This is not the first time that the Mister France committee has been accused of cheating. As a reminder, in 2020, the french magazine Voici published an article on possible cheating during the Mister France election of the same year. Alexis Villain, the representative of Centre Val de Loire, had indeed accused the committee of sexual blackmail, but the story ended there.

Hopefully the national competition can go smoothly and above all without any new scandal that only tarnishes the image of this competition.

Article written by Thomas.