“I fell into a disease called addiction”: on several occasions, Pierre Palmade confided in the media about his addiction to cocaine and his anxiety about aging, in the spiral of detoxification treatments and relapses.
At 54, the comedian was seriously injured Friday in a car accident, which also left three seriously injured, including a child and a pregnant woman who lost her baby. According to a police source, he tested positive for cocaine.
Convinced that “life only lasts for a boom”, Pierre Palmade was sentenced in 1995 for cocaine consumption. In 2019, he was taken into custody for “use and acquisition of narcotics”, after being falsely accused of rape by a sexual partner.
On the occasion of the publication in 2019 of his autobiography, “Tell my father that I am famous”, Pierre Palmade had defined himself on the set of the animator Laurent Ruquier as “alcoholic and cocaine addict, dependent on cocaine” .
“I didn’t know at 20 that it was a disease, I thought it was entertainment. I suspected at 30 that it was poison. At 40, I was sure that I was a cocaine addict and that I was going to the wall, and I’ve been trying to stop for ten years, ”he said.
In an interview granted at the same time to the newspaper Le Parisien, the humorist seemed to make a commitment: “At 50, I want to live in peace, in my job as in my private life, to turn the page of ‘a certain intense, too intense, too violent life with alcohol and drug problems, which I am in the process of dealing with’.
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Since then, Pierre Palmade had decided to move away from Parisian life and solicitations by acquiring a house in Seine-et-Marne, which has since been put up for sale.
In another register, he had explained in several media that drugs and alcohol helped him to accept being homosexual: “When I was fasting, I wanted to be straight at all costs. With alcohol and drugs, I had the freedom to be gay, I no longer judged myself, had fun”.
Last year, Muriel Robin, one of Pierre Palmade’s closest friends and several times a stage partner, confided that the comedian “scared him, a lot”. “He’s putting himself in danger so of course we’re scared,” she said.
According to relatives, Pierre Palmade had been in a relapse phase since the fall. The filming of his “Grand restaurant”, a series of unpublished sketches with a host of actors and comedians broadcast in mid-December on M6, had thus been “very complicated”.
