At the Melun criminal court,
It is enough to see him approach the bar as best he can, leaning on a crutch, his arm in a sling, to understand the violence of the shock. “Before”, Yuksel Y., 39 years old, worked in construction, was even a team leader. Now, he struggles to stand up and carry his youngest in his arms. He has put an end to football games and evenings with friends. “My life before is like a dream,” he whispers at the bar of the Melun criminal court. Before. Before February 10, 2023, when Pierre Palmade's car veered into his lane and collided head-on with his. A shock of incredible violence. The images of the vehicles projected on the screen show carcasses in pieces. Wrecks.
The actor was sentenced this Tuesday evening to five years in prison, including two years. A sentence accompanied by an obligation to care, to work and to compensate the victims. A judgment that Pierre Palmade, marked face, sallow complexion, welcomed without showing any reaction. Since the hearing opened at the start of the morning, he has been staring into space. He did not react any further when the prosecutor, Marie-Denise Pichonnier, requested this same sentence. “The accident is based exclusively on gross misconduct,” insisted the magistrate. If she welcomed the former comedian's awareness, she deplored the “scourge” of driving under drugs. “We tell drivers every day […] that they can destroy families. So we can't be too lenient. »
“For me, she was sleeping”
The list of victims' suffering is endless. Yuksel Y.'s body was crushed in the accident. The pain was so bad that he had to be anesthetized on the spot. It was on his intensive care bed that he learned that his 6-year-old son had also been seriously injured. He was sitting right behind him in the car. He too saw his vital prognosis compromised and has significant after-effects, starting with speech problems which earned him mockery in the playground. Yuksel Y. has no memory of the accident. A black hole. Mila, her sister-in-law – who was in the passenger seat – remembers the headlights coming in front of them. And then this feeling of having “been hit very hard”. Very quickly, she felt intense pain in her stomach.
Mila, a slender woman with long brown hair, was pregnant at the time of the accident. 27 weeks pregnant. A little over six months. The emergency cesarean section did not save her daughter, Solin. “I took her in my arms, for me, she was sleeping,” she explains, strangled sobs in her throat. Solin was viable at the time of the accident. But she wasn't born alive. The expert reports are clear, it was the accident that killed her. However, case law is inflexible: the death of a fetus, however dramatic it may be, cannot constitute involuntary homicide because the unborn child has no legal status. Reason why Pierre Palmade was tried for “aggravated involuntary injuries”.
“I am devastated to see the victims in real life”
But if in the eyes of justice, Solin was a “fetus”, in the heart of her mother, it was already her daughter. She had started knitting clothes for him and preparing the room. On the stand, Mila recounts her shattered life. The depression that followed the accident. This impossible postpartum. And then this new “very difficult” pregnancy. Each step reminds him of the first. She struggles to get attached. The birth of her daughter two months ago did not heal all the wounds. “It’s very difficult to hold her in my arms, they look a lot alike,” she insists.
Looking a little haggard, Pierre Palmade does not seek to deny his wrongs, nor even to minimize his responsibility. He is not surprised that the victims look away when he tries to apologize to them. “I understand the anger, a crazy drug addict crashed into them. » But the former comedian wants to tell his life before, his “slow descent into hell” which brought him before this court.
“There is the word sex, but it’s hell”
On the stand, he precisely retraces the three days of “chemsex” which preceded the accident, with two partners. “There is the word sex but it’s hell,” he insists, describing this practice as the combination of his two addictions, drugs and sex. A polydrug addict, the former actor plunged into 3-MMC in 2020. Quickly, he sank into the abyss. Can no longer play, go on stage, write. “A kind of accepted suicide,” he insists. On the day of the incident, he injected himself eight times. And this, between noon and 6:30 p.m. To avoid being overtaken by sleep – he hasn't slept in three days – he takes cocaine. “We are like zombies, vegetables, naked, bloody,” he describes.
By mid-afternoon, however, the trio's resources were exhausted. Pierre Palmade calls his dealer who agrees to make the return trip to Seine-et-Marne. While waiting for her, he decides to go shopping. “I take three or four lines of cocaine and by all means I’m the one behind the wheel.” The president questions him. Didn't he have a trigger, he who lost his father as a child in a traffic accident? “The notion of prudence and legality completely disappears in the face of three days of drugs,” he insists. He recounts his cures and his relapses, always lower than the previous one. “Addiction, this disease, is much stronger than will and intelligence,” he insists.
The accident, however, was the trigger for him. Her younger sister, Hélène, witnesses it. Before the tragedy, she imagined herself “organizing her funeral”. From now on, she sees a future for him in Bordeaux, “to carry a message”, she explains to the court. Pierre Palmade agrees. “Before the accident, I had really lost the taste for life and now, with the means I have given myself to treat myself, I have rediscovered the taste for life, for simple pleasures. » In the front row, the civil parties remain impassive. They “have lost the taste for living”, recalls their lawyer, Me Mourad Battikh.
