—Msir, please stand up.
– No, I’m sitting!
“Your name and date of birth?”
– What the hell can you do.
Black jogging, dark glasses and dark eyes, the accused turns to the public and launches a “How are you? » slinger. The tone is set. Yoann V., who has just turned 29, has no intention of giving up. After being forcibly removed from his cell the same morning, he maintained his line of defense: it will be invective. His modus operandi? Interrupt the president of the Assize Court of Maine-et-Loire with loud “blah-blah-blah”. “You sing a little high”, tries to defuse the magistrate. Nothing works.
“Do you want to adopt this attitude throughout the trial?”
– I have a lot of will, I can do this for 15 days.
Finally, he will only do “that” for seven minutes. At 11:28 a.m., handcuffed, Yoann V. was expelled and returned to the jails of the courthouse. “An accused of this type, who takes the risk of insulting and provoking the civil parties, is still very rare”, observes Me Céline Astolfe. And the lawyer, unfortunately, knows what she is talking about since she represents the Children’s Foundation, which systematically becomes a civil party in this type of case.
The case in question is a series of rapes and sexual assaults committed on more than a dozen children. And again, to the chaplain of the remand center, where he has been remanded in custody since his arrest in February 2018, bravado, he confided that he had stopped counting from the hundred victims…
Young victims with disabilities
In Angers, 18 victims will be at the heart of the debates for two weeks. They are the nephews and nieces of the accused, portrayed as “withdrawn”, “erased” but “very intelligent” by those close to him. They are also schoolgirls whom he was able to approach as part of his professional activity, he who was a CAP Petite Enfance holder. Boys, girls and even infants, aged from a few months to 4 or 5 years old, maximum. The precocity of the profiles is important. “They weren’t talking yet,” boasted Yoann V. to the same interlocutor in prison. Others suffered from handicaps and, for the defendant, it was, it seems, an additional godsend. Not only are children more vulnerable, but their infirmity, he believes, is able to prevent any revelations or restrict their verbalization. Thus, two are affected by deafness and another is autistic. “He lives in his world, and the auditions were indeed difficult,” confirms the latter’s mother.
Some have nevertheless ended up expressing things with their own words, and their evils have been noted by forensic experts. What have they been through? During his interrogations, Yoann V. preferred to evade the details, not out of shame, but out of pure perversity, “in order to harm the families who were going to imagine things”, he motivated.
Thousands of images and videos
These “things”, the families did not have to imagine them, they saw them. Because it is at the same time the great misfortune and the richness of this file: it contains thousands of images and videos shared on specialized sites, produced by the person concerned and classified with unequivocal titles (“fuck A. without censorship”, “L. first time hard”, to name only the least abject). As sordid as they are, these pictures and films lasting from a few seconds to several minutes therefore constitute irrefutable proof.
“We will never have an explanation, because the accused has completely closed himself off, but there are enough material elements to demonstrate what he did; without them, we wouldn’t know anything at all, ”says Laurence Couvreux, lawyer, in particular, of Yoann’s nephews and nieces. V., whose four siblings no longer want to hear about. “He is nothing at all, he no longer exists, he is erased from their life, which he has destroyed, continues Me Couvreux. They never noticed anything, saw their children running towards him, worshiping him as a god, but it turns out he was a devil. No one can understand how he could become a pedophile and claim it. He even says that he has been so since childhood, and that he will still be so when he gets out of prison. »
For rape and sexual assault, Yoann V. faces a maximum of 20 years in prison. But there is also decorum, “on the borders of horror”, resumes Me Astolfe. Reading the facts is nauseating. The children were bound hand and foot, gagged with tape and penetrated with rare brutality, sometimes using various objects. Some were screaming, another fainted… Acts of torture and barbarism obvious to the civil party, who is demanding the addition of this aggravating qualification. For “Blue Panda”, as he called himself on the Darknet (in this universe, the panda being the symbol of pedophiles), the penalty incurred would become life imprisonment, if the qualification was retained.
The verdict is expected for Friday, December 16.