Julie affair: “It’s a slap she takes”, fourteen years after the events, one of the firefighters prosecuted for sexual offenses against a minor finally acquitted

The Versailles court on Wednesday sentenced two firefighters to respectively four years and 15 months suspended prison sentence for sexual assault on a minormore than 14 years after the start of the Julie (not her real name) affair which accused them of rape when she was a teenager.

A third firefighter was relaxed.

The court went beyond the requisitions of the public prosecutor, who had requested that the two men, Pierre C. and Julien C., be sentenced to three years and twelve months in prison respectively, suspended.

The two men were also registered in the File of perpetrators of sexual or violent offenses (Fijais). Only the one sentenced to the heaviest sentence, Pierre C., was present during the deliberations.

In front of him, the victim's mother came alone. Leaving the courtroom, moved to tears, she said she was “devastated”.

“After 15 years of fighting, what do I say to my daughter?” she asks herself. “It’s a slap in the face that she takes, one of the two convicts wasn’t even there to receive his sentence and they walk out of court free.”

Between the ages of 13 and 15, Julie, now 29, lived with her family in the southern suburbs of Paris and underwent heavy medical treatment, due to frequent attacks of spasmophilia and tetany.

To help him, firefighters will intervene. more than 130 times at his home between 2008 and 2010.

In August 2010, the teenager and her mother filed a complaint of rape, implicating one of them the previous year, including once in the presence of two colleagues. The investigation will last nine years and twenty firefighters will intervene in the procedure, also accused of rape by Julie – they will recognize the sexual relations but will all deny any coercion.

In July 2019, a judge reclassified the facts as sexual assault without violence, coercion, threat or surprise against a minor under 15 years old in a meeting and referred the three defendants to the criminal court, arousing the anger of the family and feminist associations .

As in the trial of the Mazan rapists, the question of consent was at the center of this case.

The three defendants “constantly assured” during the investigation that Julie “had not shown any reluctance”.

Pierre C. admitted having learned Julie's age during an intervention at her home and not having wanted to “put an end” to the “relationship” he had with her, a thesis which greatly outraged the parties civil rights before the hearing.

Julie is now 80% disabled after several suicide attempts.