Five years after Evaëlle’s suicide, the trial of one of her teachers, implicated in the schoolgirl’s malaise, was to open this Monday before the Pontoise court but was postponed until next March . This 61-year-old teacher will be tried for harassment of a minor under the age of 15 on three students at a college in Val-d’Oise. The link with Evaëlle’s death was not retained, the teenager having changed college four months before the events. A fact which shocks Evaëlle’s parents who testified to TF1 in “Sept à Huit”.
“She can’t say that she didn’t participate for a minute in our daughter’s mental state,” says Marie. Through her status as a professor, she showed that we had the right to address Evaëlle in that way and to treat her in that way. […] » For this mother, the teacher has “a leading role” in her daughter’s “acting out”.
This is refuted by the accused, also questioned by TF1. She testifies to the difficulty, for five years, of hearing that she is “responsible for the death of this child”.
A hardware story that starts it all
It all started at the start of the 2018 school year, when Evaëlle entered 6th grade. Teachers who had her in their class noted that she was “a little out of step with the others”, “a little childish” and that she received “sometimes teasing” from her classmates.
Added to this situation is a banal matter of equipment. To lighten their daughter’s school bag, Marie and Sébastien bought her a binder rather than several notebooks. There followed dry exchanges in the young girl’s correspondence notebook on this subject with the French teacher who demanded a notebook. A month later, during a meeting at the college where “teacher/student harassment” was discussed, the preteen’s friends told her parents that she was “taking a lot” in French class.
Accusations that the professor disputes. She assures that she had to reframe it for problems of organization and concentration. “But I never put her in detention. I never punished her. I noticed that there were difficulties with this workbook. What I wanted was to get her out of her difficulties,” she says.
A first suicide attempt
If the situation seems to be improving with the teacher – Evaëlle having called her “nice” when she returned from class once – the teenager is not getting any better. Out of anger, she cuts her hair and makes her first suicide attempt. Her father notices black marks on the kitchen ceiling and questions her. “She started crying and said: ‘I wanted to die. I wanted to set the house on fire,’” reports his mother, very moved.
After this episode, she discovers a letter written by three of her comrades who explain to her the reasons why they no longer wish to be her friends, with very harsh words. The mother then asks Evaëlle to list the people who “attack her” physically and verbally. In total, “around fifteen” college students are registered by the teenager. This list is sent to the establishment which promises to put in place an “anti-harassment protocol”. But nothing is done. Only Evaëlle will be received by the CPE, according to the parents. In February, the harassment continued, say Sébastien and Marie.
Then, one evening, she returned saying that she had “experienced the worst day of her life”. The French teacher would have organized “an hour of class life with the subject ‘why Evaëlle feels harassed'”, says her father. The next day, the parents decided to remove their daughter from the establishment and filed a complaint against two students. For her part, the teacher denies having “put the young girl on trial”.
Up to three years of imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros
Evaëlle therefore joined another college, quite close to the old one and suffered new mockery. On June 21, 2019, she was the victim of another altercation in class. And in the evening, she hangs herself from the bars of her bed, in her room.
Our file on school bullying
After the young girl’s suicide, all her classmates are questioned and three new complaints against the teacher are filed by parents of students. Since his indictment in 2020, the accused can no longer practice. At TF1, she assures that she “passionately loves her job” and reaffirms that she has never harassed anyone. Her academic record, after thirty years of career, does not reveal any incident and paints a glowing portrait of the teacher. Her colleagues, as well as the care assistants who intervened in her class, also united behind her. She faces up to three years in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros.
