French minister who demanded Roman Polanski be freed paid for sex with 'young boys' in Thailand

Frederic Mitterand, who is openly gay and a close friend of First Lady Carla Bruni, had described the arrest of the film director for sleeping with a 13-year-old girl as ‘absolutely horrifying’.

But critics were today pointing to the Culture Minister's autobiography ‘The Bad Life’, in which he admits having been a sex tourist in Thailand. 

Mitterand, nephew of the late Socialist president Francois Mitterand, wrote: ‘I got into the habit of paying for boys.

'All these rituals of the market for youths, the slave market excite me enormously. One could judge this abominable spectacle from a moral standpoint but it pleases me beyond the reasonable.’

Bizarrely, there was little fuss when the book first came out in 2005.

But when Mitterand began trying to defend Polanski there was an outcry - to the great embarrassment of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who also initially defended Polanski.

Polanski is in a Zurich jail facing deportation to the U.S. over an outstanding conviction for unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl in 1977.