The voice is heavy, tired, marked, but determined. “I went through an ordeal. But now, I am decided to act,” Marie* announces straight away. The 35-year-old Vaudoise claims to have been the victim of a violent attack on the La Côte (VD) motorway area on May 10. “I responded to an ad on Facebook Marketplace for a piece of furniture that I liked. The seller made an appointment with me there,” she explains.
On site, the man was initially friendly. “He looked normal. When I arrived, he was in the back of his faded red van getting the furniture out. After a while he told me it was too heavy and asked me for help unloading it. I did so, without suspecting anything,” says Marie. But once inside the vehicle, it’s a black hole: “I was hit violently. I lost consciousness. When I woke up, he had uncovered my breasts and removed my pants and panties. He penetrated me vaginally with an object. Then he turned me around and penetrated me anally, before throwing me out of the vehicle.
A trauma that took Marie a long time to realize. Initially walled in silence, she finally decided to file a complaint and appeal to the media, “so that no one else gets fooled like me”.
Contacted, the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the canton of Vaud confirmed that it had opened criminal proceedings following Marie’s filing of a complaint last Friday. And to specify that the woman had been interviewed the same day. The cantonal police, for their part, affirmed that no other victim of the attacker in the red van had been announced so far. “The police have also not observed, to date and in the Vaud region, any phenomenon of attacks on physical or sexual integrity committed during appointments arranged via classified ad platforms such as Marketplace”, she adds.
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