This report was updated on February 10th 2021 after the Cour de cassation hearing.
France’s highest appeal court on Wednesday heard the final submissions in an extraordinary case in which 22 Paris firemen are accused of raping, over a two-year period, a girl when she was aged between 13 and 15. The accused, who now number 20 after the deaths of two of the firemen, have claimed that the young teenager, who was mentally fragile and heavily medicated, consented to the sexual relations, which began in early 2009.
Charges were finally brought against just three of the firemen, who currently face trial for sexually abusing Julie (not her real name), and her appeal now before the Cour de cassation is for the case against them to be amended to rape – and that others in the group should be similarly prosecuted. The arguments presented to the court centre on both the notion that a child aged between 13 and 15 cannot be considered to have the discernment to give consent to sexual relations with an adult, and that in Julie’s case this was all the more so given her state of mental instability at the time, when she was following a heavy course of prescribed medication involving anti-depressants and other mind-numbing drugs.
The magistrates of the Cour de cassation will announce their ruling on the case on March 17th.
Meanwhile, in a television interview on Tuesday evening, French justice minister Eric Dupond-Moretti announced that the government was preparing draft legislation to outlaw the notion of a young teenager’s consent to sexual intercourse with an adult. “An act of penetration carried out by an adult on a minor aged less than 15 will be rape,” he said, adding that a minimum age gap would be established.
The case of Julie is exceptional because of the nature of the alleged events, the length of the investigation, and also the political debate that has erupted during recent months over both the issue of a child’s supposed consent to sexual relations and what feminists denounce as a sexist and patriarchal bias of the justice system. They and children’s rights associations have heightened the campaign in support of Julie with the launch of the hashtag #JusticePourJulie circulating on social media, culminating on Sunday in demonstrations in Paris and elsewhere.
The now ten-year-old judicial investigation was launched after Julie filed a complaint in August 2010 accusing a number of firemen from the Paris fire brigade – a corps that is part of the French army but which operates under the authority of the Paris police prefect – of raping her when she was aged between 13 and 15. That was followed by a second complaint two years later.
In 2018, the Paris public prosecution services decided that the charge of “rape” initially envisaged against three of the accused firefighters should be changed to “abuse of a minor aged 15”. It also advised that four others in the case should stand trial for “failing to assist a person in danger” but the proceedings against them were finally dropped in 2019. Those decisions by the prosecutors were upheld by the Versailles appeal court in November last year.
The case brought before the Cour de cassation, France’s supreme appeal court, represents the last opportunity for Julie and her lawyers in their bid for the firemen to face rape charges. “We’re expecting that the Cour de cassation entirely overturn’s the Versailles ruling and that the 20 firemen return before an examining magistrate and that they [the judicial authorities] carry out a proper investigation, which until now has never been done,” said Julie’s mother, Corinne Leriche.
Julie's account
Julie says that when she was aged 13 she was raped by a fireman, Pierre C. (last name withheld), who was then aged 21. He was based at a fire station in the southern Paris suburb of Bourg-La-Reine. She says he was part of a team of firefighters who were called out by her secondary school after she had suffered a malaise – in France, firefighters also intervene in emergency medical situations – and that he had kept her personal details. He subsequently contacted her via social media.
They agreed a first meeting together in January 2009, when he called at her home and suggested a walk in the local park. But instead of that, according to her account, he took her to his own home where he forced her to perform a fellatio. “I wasn’t in a state to agree or not agree, I was taking medicines at that time,” said July in a statement given to the judicial investigation.
At that period Julie was suffering from mental health issues; she had carried out several suicide attempts, had been hospitalised several times in a psychiatric service and was prescribed a course of antidepressants, tranquilizers and neuroleptics. Pierre C. and his colleagues were aware of her condition, for the firemen at the Bourg-la-Reine station had been called to Julie’s home on no less than 130 occasions between 2008 and 2010 when she suffered from tetanic seizures.
Julie’s lawyers have underlined to the investigation on several occasions that the consequences of the heavy medication she was taking would have, they wrote, led to “submission and chemical vulnerability” that placed her in “a state of fragility and psychological weakness” to such a degree that it prevented her “free and reasoned consent”.
Julie says that in November 2009, Pierre C. again proposed oral sex to her, this time in the company of two of his colleagues, Jérôme F. and Julien C., when again she was in no state to give her consent. She claims that other non-consensual sex occurred that same day, some of it accompanied by verbal and physical violence.
Above: Julie's interview with Mediapart reporter Célia Mebroukine (from timecode 3'28", in French).
"At the of age 13, one is a child. A child cannot give her consent to sexual acts with an adult,” Julie told Mediapart.
“It was rape. Concerning me, at 13, I was a little girl. I continued to watch Disney [videos]. They succeeded in taking from me all my humanity, all the while pretending to be firemen, when they were people supposed to be helping me, to 'save' me, which meant that I was totally confident [of the situation], that I felt indebted, that I was told I was indebted.”
“I was not in a state of being able to consent because I was in a state of serious vulnerability. I spent an enormous amount of time sleeping because of my medicine, I couldn’t get to school anymore, I couldn’t think straight anymore, I couldn’t talk anymore, I babbled.”
Julie insists that the firemen she accuses knew that she was under very heavy medication. “They profited from that, they abused [my situation], they transformed me into a sexual object, they transformed me simply into an object. That’s to say that I was no longer a human being. Even to my eyes, I no longer had a value as a human being. From which is the fact that I wanted to disappear so many times, that I self-harmed.”
“There was one who lifted his fist, telling me that you are going to do that, yes, 'otherwise I’ll give you the fist'. In any case I was in such a dissociated state that as of the moment it had begun I had almost no reaction, and the only little reaction that I had I am reproached for [by the judicial investigation] as being not strong enough, and so they couldn’t understand that I was not consenting.”
Pierre C. has admitted knowing Julie’s age, but has insisted that his sexual relations with her were mutually consenting. His colleagues Jérôme F. and Julien C., meanwhile, claim they only discovered her age after the opening of the investigation. It is against these three firemen that the public prosecution services have recommended a charge of rape be changed to “abuse of a minor aged 15”.
In an email response to questions submitted by Mediapart, the lawyer acting for Jérôme F. said his client “did not commit the acts he is accused of”, adding that he will demand that the case against him be dropped.
The legal teams representing Pierre C. and Julien C. did not respond to detailed questions submitted to them by Mediapart. All of the accused in the case are allowed the presumption of innocence unless proved guilty in court.
Over a period of two years, Julie’s mobile phone number was shared in conversation groups set up by firemen, initially among those at the station in Bourg-la-Reine and later among other stations in neighbouring areas. Questioned by police, one of the firemen accused by Julie of raping her, but who finally will not face prosecution, described her as a “coche”, a term used by firemen and taken from the French word for a female pig – “cochonne” – which roughly translates as “dirty cow”.
She was contacted by tens of firemen. “I was under a lot of pressure, I received lots of text messages from firemen, I was all alone,” Julie said in a statement given to the examining magistrate in charge of the case.
In June 2010, Alexandre F. et David M., two firemen, from another station than that of Bourg-la-Reine, met Julie at a carpark. She accuses them of raping her together, while they insist that she had agreed beforehand to have sex with them both. “We had her against the car,” said Alexandre F. in a statement to police. “With David, the two of us had a go with her.” Julie insists that on that occasion too the medication she was taking meant she was in no fit mental state to knowingly agree to the intercourse.
The two men departed, leaving her alone at the carpark. Alexandre F., David M. and two of their colleagues came across Julie just minutes later. She claims she was crying and that they offered her no assistance, while the firemen have said that she showed no signs of distress. However, just hours later she was admitted to hospital after suffering a tetanic seizure.
The four men were placed under investigation for failing to assist a person in danger, but the case against them was later abandoned. Mediapart was unable to contact Alexandre F. and David M. who are not represented by lawyers.
Julie has described similar scenes with other firemen, and her lawyers have said in their submission to the investigation that the 20 firemen accused by her of rape “committed against her acts of sexual penetration that are, the ones and the others, ever more sordid”. The lawyers argue that the uniforms of the accused, their public service role and their numbers “establish a relation of dominance on this adolescent, whose psychological fragility was known to them, in order that she adopted a hyper-sexualised behaviour towards them which she was in no state to consent to”.
When police centred investigations on Julie's sexual past
It was at the end of August in 2010 when Julie filed a formal complaint against Pierre C., Jérôme F. and Julien C. for “aggravated rape” and “corruption of a minor”. In 2012, she filed another complaint for rape against 19 other firemen, including Alexandre F. and David M. All of them admitted having had sexual relations with her.
The case was initially handed to a police squad dedicated to investigating crimes against minors (the brigade de protection des mineurs) based in the south-east Paris suburb of Créteil. Mediapart has seen official copies of their interviews with Julie which took place at their offices, and which show that they focussed on her past sexual history. The officer in charge of the interviews asked her how many sexual partners she had had before her alleged rape by fireman Pierre C. at his home. He also asked her if she considered that she had a “common” sexual appetite.
“Do you see a difference between what happened and a rape?” she was asked. “I didn’t cry out, I didn’t shout,” replied Julie.
“When I left, he asked me ‘do you still want to file a complaint?’,” Julie told Mediapart. “I said ‘No’. That’s to say that during all the time of my statement, he asked me questions, saying ‘And there, did you cry out?’, and ‘there, did you resist?’. He told me that if you didn’t cry out, if you didn’t resist more than that, ‘it’s not rape’. So why do you want to file a complaint for rape?”
There were other comments that appeared to place the responsibility of the events upon Julie; one of these was when the officer considered that she had “allowed herself to be subjected to a fellatio”, and his conclusion that there was “a difference between having shame about what one does and being forced to do things”.
“That interview was a profound trauma,” Julie told Mediapart. “I left persuaded that everything that had happened I had wanted, and that everything was my fault.”
“It’s ten years that this has been going on, and it’s ten years that I have the impression of living [as if it was me] on trial, and not the trial of those who raped me. Which means that as long as I have not obtained justice, I cannot in truth begin to live again.”
“Today, in France, the investigators, those who are in contact with the victims, are supposed to be trained, about sexual violence and the consequences” said one of Julie’s lawyers, Lorraine Questiaux. “Especially the brigade [de protection] des mineurs, which boasts of being particularly trained on these issues, and there what we see is that this detective and the other investigators are in a total illegality […] not only are they supposed obviously to behave differently, but that’s a different question, but the questions they ask are contrary to the obligations that weigh upon them. They are supposed to know, to be trained, about the trauma that affects the victim. That’s to say that everything that Julie recounts conforms to everything that science knows about the victims of sexual violence.”
The modus operandi of the perpetrators is totally known, it’s something that is taught, nobody is unaware. This investigator would in reality abstract that knowledge and lead an inquiry based on his own references, which are those of an aggressor.”
The contested findings of a psychiatrist's report
In the examining magistrate’s summing up of the investigation in June 2018, which Mediapart has seen, he noted as of the opening pages that it was “necessary to firstly examine the personality of the victim in order to best allow an understanding of the events”. The report by the magistrate – who has the title of judge – insisted, over several long paragraphs, upon the personality traits which might undermine Julie’s accusations. This included the statements from people who knew her in which they described Julie as a “manipulator, egocentric” who was on the verges of “mythomania”.
Importantly, the magistrate highlighted a report by psychiatrist Paul Bensussan (his website profile, in French, here), whose findings in other cases have been contested by victims’ defence associations. He described Julie’s personality as being “hysterical and borderline”, adding that she had a “tendency to dramatize symptoms”. Despite the sexist connotation of his findings, the examining magistrate refused requests by Julie’s family for a separate expert assessment by another psychiatrist.
Lorraine Questiaux, one of two lawyers recently appointed to represent Julie, said that Bensussan’s report had “polluted the legal proceedings with a frankly discriminatory ideology and which stands in contradiction with regard to scientific knowledge”.
But the examining magistrate’s summary of the case is almost exclusively based on Bensussan’s report, while it also highlighted the firemen’s allegations that Julie had “the appearance of an adult”, that she was “labelled as a nymphomaniac” at the [fire brigade] station, and was “very much in demand”.
Just one paragraph of the judge’s report mentioned Julie’s fragile state of mind, her heavy medication, and the knowledge the firemen had of her condition.
The magistrate underlined “the consistency of the statements of the accused” which, for him, showed that “the failure of Julie to consent appears insufficiently clear” for him to decide that the events which took place were the multiple rapes of a minor.
In their arguments submitted before the Cour de cassation ahead of this Wednesday, Julie’s lawyers underlined that the examining magistrate in charge of the investigation did not apply an equal attention to the attitudes of those she accused. “The judge must not give priority to a reasoning of the victim, by seeking to establish if she was consenting or not, but rather of the point of view of the perpetrator of the sexual act […], by investigating whether he has by violence, force, threat or surprise, viciated the consent of the victim,” they wrote. The judge’s approach, they added, “also favours a sexist, stereotyped and simplistic vision which consists of considering that, if the woman accepts to assuage the sexual desires of the man, she is not the victim of rape or sexual aggression.”
That reflection is at the heart of the debate that has been prompted by the case, and which feminist associations say is symptomatic of the approach by the police and justice institutions towards the issue of rape.
' What Julie said was not believed'
For feminists, Julie’s case represents all they have denounced for years, and which was the sense of the demonstrations called in support of the young woman which were held in Paris and several towns across France on Sunday (and which was also detailed in an open letter published on Mediapart – in French here – and signed by more than 40 people, including feminists and child protection associations, but also Members of Parliament, lawyers, union officials and journalists).
In that open letter, they describe the case as a “denial of justice” that “totally runs counter to the upheaval within society in face of sexual violence perpetrated against children”.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
“In this case there are only errors and serious faults,” said Julie’s lawyer, Lorraine Questiaux. She denounced what she called a “sexist ideology of the culture of rape” within the judicial institution “diverted from its objective and which, instead of serving the weak, guarantees archaic privileges”.
For Marjolaine Vignola, Julie’s other lawyer, “the case is symptomatic of the failings of the police, the justice system and experts to take into account, seriously and intelligently, the word of women”.
Such failings, argue feminists, are not down to a lack of training of an individual; the case of Julie was overseen by successive magistrates who came to the same conclusions. It is also not the first time that such a controversy has erupted; in 2017, the public prosecution services decided to drop rape charges against a 28-year-old man who had sexual relations with an 11-year-old girl, in favour of a charge of sexual abuse.
“The culture of rape still exists, and it’s not a question of training,” said Céline Piques, spokeswoman for the association Osez le féminisme (which loosely translates as ‘Dare feminism’). She sees “an institutional ill-treatment of victims”, adding: “This time we want to show the locks within the institutions. We want to show that the existence of profoundly sexist people”.
The “anger” which Piques says she feels is shared by others who work in associations active in the field of the protection of children’s rights, like Homayra Sellier of the group Innocence en danger. “For years, there has been a preference to protect institutions, like that of the firemen,” she said. “But it was a different time. It’s finished. Today, if one commits rape one should face up to it.”
Marie-Pierre Colombe is a member of the child protection association Enfance et partage, which is a civil party to the case involving Julie. “In this case, what Julie said was not believed,” she commented. “You see it in other cases. A child’s story is not often taken into account […] While the justice system cannot move as fast as the social media, it must move forward.”
Suzy Rojtman, from the National Collective for the Rights of Women (the CNDF), argues that the gap between the approach of the justice system towards sexual violence and the evolution of attitudes in society is down to a multi-faceted masculine domination. “We are in a patriarchal society,” she said. “Justice and law are the result of a balance of power.”
Feminist and child protection activists are not all in agreement about whether the law should be changed. There are calls for the prosecution of crimes of sexual violence to be free of the statute of limitations, while on February 18th, the National Assembly, the French lower house of Parliament, is due to begin debating proposed legislation which would introduce a legal presumption of non-consent regarding cases of children below the age of 15 who have had sexual relations with an adult.
Julie’s lawyers argue that the issue is not about a change in the law, but a different way of applying it. “As long as the law will be applied by misogynists, in a patriarchal system, it can always be twisted at will,” said Vignola.
“Under existing law we’d have no difficulty if the personnel were properly trained and not colonised by the culture of rape”, added Questiaux.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse