Two accused firefighters, aged 35 each, were sentenced this Wednesday, November 27 to respectively four years and fifteen months in prison, suspended by the criminal court of Versailles for acts of sexual assault on a minor. A third firefighter was released.
The court went beyond the requests of the public prosecutor, who had requested that Pierre C. and Julien C. be sentenced to three years and twelve months in prison respectively, suspended. The two men were also registered in the File of perpetrators of sexual or violent offenses (Fijais). Only the one sentenced to the heaviest sentence, Pierre C., was present during the deliberations.
“It’s a slap she takes”
In front of him, the victim's mother came alone. Leaving the courtroom, moved to tears, she confided that she was “collapsed”. “After fifteen years of fighting, what do I say to my daughter?” she asks herself. “It’s a slap in the face that she takes, one of the two convicts wasn’t even there to receive his sentence and they walk out of the court free.”
The hearing took place on Tuesday October 15 and Wednesday October 16, behind closed doors, at the request of Julie's family. Now aged 29, the young woman was accompanied by her mother, father and brother. “Given the great publicity [autour de l’affaire]it is appropriate to keep Julie's identity secret, as well as her face.pleaded Me Mehdy Kadri at the very beginning of the hearing.
The firefighters' defense never opposed this request, while saying “regret that, for fifteen yearsthis trial is taking place in the press because of the civil party who, at the last moment, now wants to exclude the press from this courtroom”.
A controversial requalification
If the decision was long awaited by Julie and her mother, Corinne Leriche, it is not an end in itself. Indeed, of the 20 firefighters that Julie accused of rape, only three had been indicted for “sexual abuse”.
In 2009, these soldiers intervened dozens of times at Julie's home, in the south of Paris, between the ages of 13 and 15, for attacks of spasmophilia and tetany. At the time, according to her mother, the teenager, who had made several suicide attempts, was undergoing heavy medical treatment to treat depression in particular. In August 2010, she filed a complaint, accusing a firefighter of having raped her several times, including once in the presence of two colleagues.
The facts were reclassified in July 2019 as sexual assault, without violence, coercion, threat or surprise against a minor under 15 years old by several people. The three men therefore no longer risked twenty but seven years of imprisonment. This reclassification, confirmed on appeal then in cassation, aroused indignation from feminist associations and the family.
