Advocate General Philippe Courroye asked the five judges of the Paris criminal court to sentence Salim Berrada to nineteen years of imprisonment on Thursday, March 28, but it is the 38-year-old accused, more than the magistrates, whom he addressed throughout his indictment. As if, more than winning the conviction of the court, which seems acquired since the first day of the trial, he had wanted to try one last time to change the one who, nine years after the first complaint against him, remains “bunkered into the concrete of its denials”.
So it was almost three hours of an eye-to-eye monologue with a man ” dangerous “accused of thirteen rapes and four sexual assaults on young women then aged 18 to 28 who fell into his “trap of rue Pixérécourt”in the 20e district of Paris, where they had gone imagining taking part in a shooting from this fashion photographer with emerging notoriety.
Salim Berrada refutes all accusations. “None of these young girls were raped or sexually assaulted, all were consenting, move on, there’s nothing to see” : thus Philippe Courroye summarized the position of an accused “alone against all”animated by a “total feeling of impunity” similar to that of “the motorist who goes up the highway in the wrong direction while honking”.
“She said she refused, didn’t you hear? »
One after the other, the attorney general named the seventeen complainants, taking extracts from their depositions which he punctuated with questions to the accused. Alice (first names have been changed), who told the stand that she “cried from start to finish” during their sexual intercourse: “What more does it take, sir, to make you understand that she is not consenting? » Solène, who told him “you don’t have to, twice” before the rape she denounces: “She said she refused, didn’t you hear? » Fanny, who kicked the accused’s pelvis with her heel to free herself from his embrace: “If that’s not a physically expressed refusal, what is? » Like that, seventeen times.
Anticipating the arguments of the defense lawyers, who must plead Friday morning, Philippe Courroye insisted: this case is not just word against word. There are the witnesses – the friend, the boyfriend, the mother – who came to tell of the state of shock in which they found the complainants after the events. There are traumas recounted by those involved or observed by doctors – romantic or professional breakups, depression, addictions, nightmares, etc. Fanny, with her bruises noticed the day after the events, who lost her hair and did not have sexual relations for two years afterwards. “Is that junk, sir? Is this compatible with a perfectly consensual sexual relationship? »
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