At his trial, Pierre Palmade asks the victims for forgiveness

Pierre Palmade said Wednesday at his trial that he was “overwhelmed” by the serious physical and psychological injuries caused to the victims of the accident he caused. “MY’s serious injuries and MC’s trauma knocked me down. I am really overwhelmed, tested to see them in real life,” declared the 56-year-old artist in a hoarse voice during his first words on the stand. Turning towards the benches of the civil parties, his hand on his stomach, his face ravaged, he addressed them directly to “ask for forgiveness from the depths of (his) being”.

In a hoarse voice, the actor returned to the circumstances which led to this dramatic collision. For three days, Palmade had been partying continuously without sleeping between Paris and his country house in Cély-en-Bière, alternating between injections of 3-MMC (a synthetic drug), taking cocaine and playing “chemsex”. » with “sex friends”. “We are really like zombies, vegetables, naked, bloody,” he describes to the judges.

Required sentence: five years in prison

On Friday evening, at nightfall, the comedian gets in the car with two companions to go buy dinner at the local supermarket before the arrival of his dealer responsible for restocking drugs. Knocked out by 3-MMC, he takes several lines of cocaine before getting behind the wheel to “wake up again”.

“I see all three of us leaving the house euphoric and then it’s dark, I open my eyes and I’m (at the) Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital,” says Palmade, who says he has no memory of the accident. On his hospital bed, “I am told that there are injured people, a family, the loss of a baby, manslaughter… Lots of words that I don’t understand. I understand that I am in hell,” confides Pierre Palmade.

At the opening of the trial, the victims of the accident recounted their destroyed lives. In the car were the 38-year-old driver and his 27-year-old sister-in-law in the front, and the motorist’s six-year-old boy in the back. Their vital prognoses have been engaged. “It is very difficult for me to be present today in this room, there is a lot of work being done with my psychiatrist,” declared Mila, a former support worker for students with disabilities (AESH).

Six months pregnant at the time of the accident, she underwent an emergency cesarean section. Her unborn daughter, named Solin, was declared dead after 32 minutes of resuscitation, without giving any sign of extra-uterine life. According to consistent case law of the Court of Cassation, a child who is not born alive does not exist as a legal person.

“I am waiting for this jurisprudence to change and for Solin to be the key to bringing about this change,” declared the woman who is now the mother of a 2-month-old daughter, after a “very painful pregnancy”. Questioned by the president, Pierre Palmade refused to be tried for manslaughter.

Using a crutch, his left arm in a sling, Yuksel Yakut, driver of the violently hit car, sat with difficulty in front of the court. “I won’t be able to go back to the way I was before,” he said, his words being translated into Turkish by an interpreter. His liver and intestines were affected and his hips remain very fragile. His pain pushes him to take medication in the morning.

“I was team leader, I had friends, during the weekend I tried to enjoy with my children, my family (…). Today, I can no longer do this kind of thing,” he testified. His son “is really not like before, he does not want to go out with his friends, he has repeated a year at school,” said the father, explaining that his child had more nightmares and was the victim of teasing because of this. of his jaw deformed following the accident.