‘Emily in Paris’ season 4 just did something totally uncharacteristic and got real for a moment

Emily in Paris season 4 part 1 isn’t all fluff as usual; it’s charting an unusual course for the show. In fact, this one character, Louis de Leon, has an arc that is all too familiar to anyone who paid attention to the #MeToo movement when it took every industry from film to fashion by storm.

Who is Louis de Leon in Emily in Paris?

In the series, Louis de Leon, played by Pierre Deny, is the head of the luxury fashion conglomerate JVMA and the father of Nicholas de Leon (Paul Forman). In season 3, we find out that Emily’s (Lily Collins) bestie Mindy Chen (Ashley Park) and Nicholas were friends during their boarding school days in Switzerland, and that he had a crush on her. Later in the season, after Benoit (Kevin Dias) and Mindy break up, she and Nicholas get together.

It’s not a smooth-sailing relationship, because Agence Grateau’s manoeuvre during the Pierre Cadault (Jean-Christophe Bouvet) takeover by Grégory Duprée (Jeremy O. Harris) causes major embarrassment for the de Leon family. And that causes Nicholas, who already dislikes Emily for asking her boss Sylvie Grateau (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu) to speak with his father about it, to detest Emily even more and keep her away from Mindy. When Mindy finds out, she is mad, but Nicholas manages to make up with her and apologise to Emily at Camille (Camille Razat) and Gabriel’s (Lucas Bravo) engagement party. Going into season 4, they are still both dating.

As for Louis de Leon, a rather powerful man in fashion, there are major hints that he took advantage of Sylvie Grateau when she was younger and worked for him at JVMA for a while. Now that Sylvie’s a major player in the game, Louis tries to get her to move past what happened, telling her that he is a different man now. Furthermore, as most men like him are known to do, he tries to buy Sylvie’s silence by striking a deal with her husband Laurent G (Arnaud Binard) to financially back the expansion of his nightclub in Paris, enabling Laurent to move back in with Sylvie.

While Laurent knows that Sylvie doesn’t quite like Louis de Leon, he never finds out what actually happened between them, until season 4.

What happens to Louis de Leon in Emily in Paris season 4?

Unlike what he told Sylvie, Louis isn’t a changed man after all. And it sure looks like Louis de Leon is about to get his comeuppance this season.

After Nicholas leaves Mindy alone in the JVMA brand closet to pick whatever she wants as an apology for not standing up against his father’s misogynistic treatment of Mindy at Roland Garros, she encounters two women from the JVMA staff who are shocked to find her in the closet solo. They assume she is new because no woman ever goes to the closet alone. A confused Mindy then finds out that it’s because Louis de Leon has a habit of leveraging his power to sexually harass women staffers in the closet by making them try on clothes in front of him. If they refuse, he shames them for not understanding fashion.

Mindy narrates this incident to Emily, who then informs her boss Sylvie about it. It just so happens that at that very moment, Sylvie is being chased down by a reporter doing an exposé on Louis de Leon. She initially ignores the calls and emails because she’s afraid that it might ruin her husband’s nightclub deal with JVMA. And she believes that Louis had stopped with his antics.

However, when Emily reveals that’s not the case, Sylvie makes the hard choice to come forth with the truth of how Louis de Leon abused his power with her. On the night of the masquerade ball for Maison Lavaux x Baccarat, the article comes out, and of course, there’s fallout from it, both good and bad.

Sylvie’s husband loses the JVMA funding for his club, but somehow they sail through. Julien (Samuel Arnold) is asked to spill dirt on his former boss Sylvie, but he instead chooses to quit JVMA and return to Agence Grateau. And even as Mindy offers moral support to Nicholas, she makes it clear that she’ll support him only as long as he’s on the side of what’s right. So when he tries to get her to pose for a picture with him and his dad at an event, she gets angry and refuses to show support for a harasser. It appears that she might soon realise her relationship with Nicholas isn’t working, and with Benoit still in the picture, they could get back.

We don’t know what’s up with Louis de Leon in the aftermath of the exposé quite yet, but that could be explored in part 2. But one thing is for sure, Emily in Paris did get real for a change instead of its usual fluff. And even though we think it was very neatly wrapped up (read our review), we hope it has more such instances of reality barging in.