Every morning, as soon as she opened her eyes, Emilie (all the first names of the young women have been changed in order to protect them) grabs the pillbox on his nightstand. She removes the earplugs that protect her from her hyperacusis, then swallows beta-blockers to calm her tachycardia and anxiolytics for her generalized anxiety. Then, she waits for the molecules to take effect before getting up.
The thirty-year-old also suffers from bruxism: the involuntary clenching of her teeth is such that she had to have nearly 700 euros of botox injected into her jaw to compensate. “I’m on 12,000 euros of treatment to manage the symptoms of the rapes I suffered in the French Bukkake affair and, afterwards, the courts come to explain to us that it’s not torture? »expresses, angry, the one who is a civil party in one of the biggest cases of sexual violence in French judicial history, the file known as “French Bukkake”, named after this network which filmed and then broadcast hundreds of pornographic videos of young women being attacked.
Opened in spring 2020 and carried out by the research section of the Paris gendarmerie, this immense investigation resulted in the drafting of an indictment order before the Paris departmental criminal court, at the end of August 2023. The two judges of instruction of the file request that in the name of a “systemic practice”seventeen men are indicted for “gang rape”, “trafficking in human beings by an organized gang” or even “aggravated pimping” out of around fifty civil parties.
The young women, grappling with the very serious consequences of the injuries imposed by the network, asked their lawyers to appeal the order before the investigating chamber, in order to obtain recognition of a certain number of aggravating circumstances which would trigger the holding of the trial before an assize court and the increase in the penalties incurred for the perpetrators.
“We cannot afford sub-justice”
“There are not many cases like this in history, and we cannot afford sub-justice”argues Me Vanina Meplain, lawyer from Sofia. Thus, the forty representatives of the civil parties plead for the addition to the charges of the “particular vulnerability” of the victims, known to the perpetrators, of the motives of “sexism” and “racism” – the file is full of qualifiers like “beurette” Or “ball dumper” – and above all “acts of torture and barbarity”.
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