On the civil parties bench of the Nanterre court (Hauts-de-Seine), Martine Ghione, 65, has her eyes reddened by tears. She holds in her hands the smiling portrait of Mélanie, her dead eldest daughter, “so that she is present”. Like her, around forty people again testified at the appeal trial of Mickaël Philetas, 42 years old, black goatee and mustache, shaved head, his gaze constantly turned towards the court. Since February 5, this self-proclaimed “seduction coach” of Guadeloupean origin has been on trial for the assassination of his ex-partner, Mélanie Ghione, then aged 34, and a double attempted murder committed on her relatives. here, in 2020, in Ecquevilly (Yvelines). At the end of this trial, the verdict sentenced him on February 15 to life imprisonment, accompanied by a security sentence of twenty-two years. In January 2023, he was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Versailles Assize Court, before appealing.
A few years before the tragedy, the accused had become locked in a spiral of hatred towards women. An ideology which found its culmination in the femicide of Mélanie Ghione, at the end of January 2020, according to the public prosecutor at first instance, Marine Montauzou: “For Mickaël Philetas, the three exit doors [du couple] are the prison, the morgue or the street; and a man, a real one, must have the power of life or death over a woman. This philosophy represents, if not all, at least an essential point of his personality. »
At the appeal trial, the president of the court, Emmanuelle Bessone, immediately questions the accused: “Do you experience women as a threat? » Answer : “There was a period in my life when I thought that. » In 2017, Mickaël Philetas launched his YouTube channel dedicated to communication, seduction and masculinism. This current of thought that appeared in the 1970s in North America considers that feminism has caused a crisis in masculinity. “By hearing subscribers to his channel share their experiences, we can wonder if he himself did not feed on this resentment towards women, sasks Frédéric Roussel, lawyer for the Ghione family. Who influenced the other? Did he feed the monster or did the monster feed him? »
Eighty stab wounds
In the small town of Ecquevilly, femicide has left its mark. “In sixteen years of work, I have never seen such a bloody crime scene,” reaffirmed, on February 8, in front of the judges, chief warrant officer Céline Dupont, director of the investigation in the research section of the Versailles gendarmerie. On January 29, 2020, it was 2 a.m. when Malaury Ghione, 20, went home to sleep in the pavilion of his big sister, Mélanie. She also finds Brayan Hernández, 27, a Colombian zumba teacher and new boyfriend of Mélanie Ghione, a chartered accountant, who met him during a dance class. The student spends the night on the sofa in the living room, on the first floor, while the couple sleeps in the marital bedroom on the second. Mélanie’s daughter, aged 8, born from a previous affair, is at a friend’s house.
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