Gisèle Halimi (left), Agnès Fichot (center) and Araceli Castellano at the Aix-en-Provence courthouse in May 1978. Roger PICHERIE/PARISMATCH/SCOOP
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Interview In 1978, Agnès Fichot was Gisèle Halimi's collaborator in the Aix-en-Provence rape trial, following which the law on rape evolved. This week, she went to Avignon to follow the defense arguments at the Mazan rape trial. Interview.
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It was amid insults and spitting that Anne Tonglet, 28, and Araceli Castellano, 23, two young Belgian women, arrived at the Aix-en-Provence courthouse on May 2 and 3, 1978, for the trial of the three men accused of having raped them, one night in August 1974, in a cove near Marseille. A trial which came after four years of proceedings, during which they had fought, with their lawyers Gisèle Halimi and Agnès Fichot, for the case to be judged at the assizes. It led to the defendants being sentenced to criminal imprisonment – six years for one, four years for the other two – and notably allowed, in the law of December 1980, a more precise definition of rape.
Since the start of the so-called “Mazan rape” trial in Avignon, the parallel is often made with that of Aix. Agnès Fichot, who was making her debut as a lawyer, was then 27 years old: a young collaborator of Gisèle Halimi, she had pleaded in this case. She is now 75 years old. Always involved in the defense of the most vulnerable, she went to Avignon the first week of the defense pleadings.
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