Someone came to say good things about Salim Berrada, Wednesday March 27, on the eighth day of his trial before the Paris criminal court. A strange moment, after a week of hearing the horrors on his account recounted day after day in the bar by the young women who accuse him of rape and sexual assault between 2014 and 2016, and have established this former fashion photographer aged 38 the portrait of an immense pervert and an irredeemable predator.
Someone came to say good things about Salim Berrada, therefore, and it lasted three minutes. The time for a forty-year-old working in advertising to recount their meeting in 2020 while he was under judicial supervision while awaiting his trial, the birth of his friendship for this boy ” clever “, ” END “, ” sensitive “, ” funny “and his conscience upon discovering the situation. “I haven’t cut him out of my life and until you find him guilty, I won’t. »
He was the only defense witness. Two others were included in the hearing schedule. One gave up because she was refused access to the closed session. No news from the second. Salim Berrada had also hoped that Justine (first name has been changed) would testify in his favor. At the start of the procedure, he had given the investigating judge the name of this mannequin crossed on photo shoots, who could vouch for his integrity. Justine did come to the stand on Monday, but to charge Salim Berrada, against whom, in the meantime, she had in turn filed a complaint for rape.
“It’s almost activism”
The seventeenth and final plaintiff came to testify on Wednesday. For the seventeenth time, Salim Berrada denied and mentioned a consensual relationship. As always, the attorney general asked the complainant if she was aware of the seriousness of her accusations and the sanction they could result in – twenty years in prison. As always, the complainant answered yes.
This will have been a leitmotif of the prosecution: why would seventeen women who do not know each other have subjected themselves to eight years of legal proceedings, interrogations by the police, judges and psychologists, toxicological analyzes, confrontations with the accused and, finally, two weeks of hearing in Paris, for which some had to come from Spain, Mexico or Taiwan, if they had not really suffered the facts they denounce?
“It’s possible to file a complaint for nothingreplied the accused on Wednesday, with the confidence that has never left him. Apparently, no one wants to believe our thesis, but we can not have experienced non-consensual sexual relations and still file a complaint. » Because we convince ourselves that we have been raped by discovering that we slept with a man whom rumor on the Internet designates as a repeat rapist, and that he is not “it’s not conceivable to have slept with that monster”. Or because, even knowing very well that we have not been raped, we think “serve a noble cause. It’s almost activism.”
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