Target of a violent assault in Essonne, whose video had gone viral, the young Yanis, 17, came to tell his story in TPMP. A moving testimony on the violence suffered.
The facts unfolded Thursday, September 30, 2021: a young man suffered a violent assault in Montgeron, in Essonne. The scene was filmed and widely relayed on social networks. The affair then took on a huge scale, due to the violence of the video and the homophobic nature of the assault. An investigation was opened and entrusted to the Montgeron police station to “violence aggravated by three circumstances”: “in a meeting, because of the supposed sexual orientation and by someone hiding their face”.
Yanis, the attacked young man, is came to testify in TPMP on Wednesday, October 13, 2021, with his sister. The day before, it is the version of his attackers who were exposed in the same program, through a man from their neighborhood. Yanis testifies masked, very shocked by what happened to him: to have been beaten for free by a group of individuals shouting at him “PD”, he said.
“I was with my best friend. About ten guys called her out, but she didn’t look back. They told me straight away that I was ‘a PD’, ‘a gay’, tells the victim alongside her big sister, in tears. (…) They grabbed me from behind, threw me, hit me. My best friend picked me up and we resumed our journey. “ He pursues : “They came from both sides of the building, they took my head and neck against the fence. They hit me, punches (…) in the head. I think it was free. . Especially since I am not gay. I did not answer anything, they were filming, it was laughing “. At the end, “a mother came to save me”, he adds, assuring that he thought he “was going to die”. “I can’t get over it (…) my life is over”, explains Yanis. The young man, very shocked, revealed that he had already been the victim of harassment in his teenage years, in middle and high school.
Violence suffered in his youth
Yanis tells TPMP episodes of great violence that occurred earlier in his life. Known for his short videos made on Snapchat, he was then the target of young people his age. In college, he was harassed to the point of sexual assault, when a student pulled his pants down in the playground. Then comes high school, a period when he has to take refuge in the toilets to escape his harassers. The other students then come to open the door and hit him “with screwdrivers” .
Yannis would have lodged a complaint, but the teachers would have done nothing. He did not return to high school until two months after the assaults and was asked to repeat a year because of “too many absences”. If his intervention moved a lot on social networks, Yanis, 17, confides that he no longer has dreams.
To see also: What is cyber harassment?