A trial which is reminiscent of that of Mazan. A 38-year-old man has been on trial since Wednesday before the Var Assize Court, in Draguignan, where he is being prosecuted for having regularly raped his teenage daughter and having handed her over to strangers.
“At that moment, this father/daughter relationship seemed normal to me,” says the young woman, invited to speak on the stand from the opening of the debates. In front of the jurors, she expressed the guilt she initially felt when her father was arrested. But “now I can separate the two, the dad and what happened,” she explains. Aged 18, the victim came accompanied by her dog and refused to allow the proceedings to be held behind closed doors. “I have absolutely nothing to say to him, I’m just angry,” she says, adding that she expects to be able to “move on to something else”.
According to his statements, his father forced him to have frequent sexual relations, without his mother’s knowledge, since the age of 13. Alternating between cajoling and threatening, he exercised absolute control over her, monitoring her outings and following her social media accounts on her own phone.
“My brain was in off mode”
Then he began to lead her to other men, often much older, recruited on classified ad sites like Wannonce, where he presented himself as a couple of young adults looking to satisfy a fantasy. Blindfolded, the young girl had to submit to the desires of these men, in the presence of her father who directed, participated and filmed.
“When I told him no, it was still yes,” she told investigators. “I never said a word […]. My brain was in off mode, I was under remote control.”
But, in the summer of 2021, when the victim was 15 years old, the man, who then weighed 160 kg, started hitting her. One evening in August 2021, a few days after more violent beatings and a particularly “sordid” rape, the teenager ran away from home and was taken in by a passer-by.
In his defense, the father mentioned a romantic relationship with his daughter, maintaining that he had only given in to her advances. The trial is scheduled to last until Friday. The accused faces up to 20 years in prison.
