They lived together for nineteen years and had two brilliant daughters who made them proud. Mohamed and Muriel (1) are currently in the process of divorcing. He is in the dock, to the right of the jurors, detained for three years. She is seated on the left, on the civil party’s bench. Muriel accuses her husband of having wanted to kill her on the morning of July 4, 2021 while the couple was jogging in the Semboules park in Antibes. He fiercely defends himself: “I could never stand it when people said that I could have harmed my wife.” The couple, at the time, no longer got along. Muriel reveals that she had suffered violence several times before this dramatic climax, on their wedding anniversary.
The Alpes-Maritimes Assize Court is devoting the week to this case. The Court and the jurors listen this Tuesday to the testimony of Muriel, a blonde forty-year-old with a sad face: “I don’t remember much. He wanted to accompany me on a jog. He had difficulty following me. I went back and forth to join him. I don’t have any images associated with the fall. Only pain in my ankle. I was lying on the ground, I saw his face and his hands on my neck, but I had no pain. Like a feeling of imminent death.
While her husband, very agitated and confused, according to witnesses, raised the alarm, a jogger (professional doctor) and a crew of firefighters ended up, after more than a quarter of an hour of searching, discovering in a ravine Muriel, lying in the direction of the slope, unconscious among the brambles and branches. The victim eventually regains his senses. “Her first words were: ‘My husband wanted to kill me,’ testifies the firefighter.
Was she disoriented after a fall as her husband claims? The previous month, Mohamed, during yet another argument, allegedly pretended to throw their car against a truck. He was registered on a dating site and was increasingly absent from the marital home. She had a lover. Their love story was inexorably disintegrating.
Tuesday, on the second day of the trial, Muriel describes a controlling relationship with her husband: “I accepted the unacceptable. It got into my brain. It was a relationship of domination. […] I completely lost confidence in myself. I always had hope that he would change. When you live with violence for so long, it’s difficult to talk about it. Every time he hit me, he said it was my fault and I started to believe it.”
The highlight of the trial, this Tuesday, is the testimony of the couple’s two daughters, moving victims of a conflict of loyalty. The eldest breaks down at the bar of the assize court: “We love them the same way. We only have one mother, only one father. We are in a ditch where we are pushed to choose. We want everything to work out, for our father get out, but I’m also afraid for my mom, I want her to feel safe.” The trial is scheduled to end Friday.
1- The first names have been changed
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