By sudouest.fr with AFP
The 52-year-old man was accused of having committed countless rapes of his partner’s daughter, up to the visiting room of the prison where he was detained
A 52-year-old man, a former volunteer firefighter, was sentenced Thursday, January 27 to thirty years of criminal imprisonment in Nîmes for countless rapes committed on the daughter of his companion, to the visiting room of the prison where he was detained. The girl’s mother was found guilty of complicity and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment, while the prosecution had requested a ten-year sentence against her. The two convicted have ten days to appeal.
The Advocate General, Pierre Couttenier, beat his guilt for a long time, “pleading guilty as a defender of society”. “The truth, it shatters,” he said, addressing the victim, now 19 years old, attentively on the bench of the civil parties. And, turning to the jurors: “You do not doubt for a moment the hell from which she returns to us: less a desert island than an island populated by deserters”.
The representative of the public prosecutor noted all the shortcomings, failures, hesitations, which from the prison administration to the justice system and the educational assistance services, “left this child alone facing the world” and her “predator”.
“Dangerous personality”
Since the opening of the trial on Tuesday, the main defendant, a former volunteer firefighter and ex-boxer, has for the first time admitted the facts.
“I take it to your credit, and that’s the only thing,” the Advocate General told him. For the rest, “the staggering number of crimes you have committed are the sign of a dangerous personality”, he added.
With regard to the companion of the ex-firefighter, also on the dock, Pierre Couttenier stressed that it was she who, in 2011, when his daughter was seven or eight years old, “opened the door” of her house to a man she barely knew. She was also the one who let him sleep almost immediately in the little girl’s bed, drive her to school or share a hotel room, all opportunities he seized to rape her.
Then, when the man she said she was in love with was imprisoned in 2013, after being sentenced to 20 years in prison for raping minors, she did not want to believe in his guilt.
She then forced her daughter to accompany her 107 times to the visiting room of the Nîmes prison, where he imposed digital penetrations on her until January 2016. In her defense, she keeps repeating that she does not had imagined nothing, perceived nothing, guessed nothing, in spite of his daughter’s denunciations.
“I ask that you be condemned for complicity in all these almost daily rapes. By your actions, you have made them possible,” said the Advocate General. He had requested a ten-year prison sentence, acknowledging extenuating circumstances for this 51-year-old woman, deprived of affection and education during her childhood, chronically depressed and suffering from cancer at the time. The floor will be with the defense in the afternoon.