A deputy speaker of France’s parliament resigned on Monday after becoming the latest French politician to face sexual harassment allegations, claims he vehemently denies.Denis Baupin, a former member of the ecologist EELV party who is married to Housing Minister Emmanuelle Cosse, plans to sue the women for defamation, his lawyer Emmanuel Pierrat said.The allegations are ‘mendacious, defamatory and baseless,’ Pierrat said in a statement.‘Sexual harassment and even more so sexual aggression are totally foreign’ to Baupin, who is one of parliament’s six deputy speakers, he added.Parliament speaker Claude Bartolone had summoned Baupin earlier Monday and asked him to resign, the National Assembly said in a statement.Baupin said in an email to Bartolone seen by AFP that he was stepping down from the position he has held for nearly four years in order to ‘best prepare my defence’.The scandal adds to a series of sexual allegations against French politicians even after the spectacular fall from grace in May 2011 of former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.The latest high-profile case involved Finance Minister Michel Sapin, accused in a book published in April of sexually harassing a journalist, an allegation he brushed off as ‘inexact and slanderous’.The four EELV party members made the allegations against the 41-year-old Baupin to French media.EELV spokeswoman Sandrine Rousseau told the Mediapart website and France Inter radio that Baupin made an aggressive pass at her in October 2011 during a party meeting.‘At one point I wanted to take a break,’ she said.‘Denis Baupin appeared in the corridor outside... He pinned me against the wall with his chest and tried to kiss me. I pushed him away vigorously.’The encounter made Rousseau ‘very uneasy’, she said.‘I immediately thought that it was absolutely not normal that this should happen to me. But I thought of it as sexual aggression much later,’ she said.- ‘People kept quiet’ –Isabelle Attard, a former EELV deputy, said Baupin used to subject her to ‘almost daily harassment with provocative, salacious text messages’ between June 2012 and the end of 2013, when she left the party.Two other elected Green party members, Elen Debost, who is deputy mayor of the central city of Le Mans, and Annie Lahmer, a member of the Paris regional government, have also accused Baupin of sexual impropriety.Debost said ‘a lot of people kept quiet so as not to harm his campaign’.Lahmer says the incidents date back more than 15 years.French law has a statute of limitations of three years in cases of sexual harassment or aggression, except when the alleged victim is a minor, when it is longer.Baupin left the EELV party last month over ‘strategic disagreements’ ahead of elections next year.The sexual assault case against Strauss-Kahn, who had been tipped for the French presidency in 2012, involved a New York hotel maid and was settled in a civil suit.Last year, women journalists teamed up to write an op-ed piece in France`s left-leaning Liberation daily complaining that they are routinely subjected to harassment by the men they are assigned to interview.