In the glass box in which he appears, Salim B. assures him: he was “a great sentimentalist”. It is not this side of the character that the spectators who stare at him from the front rows of the courtroom knew. They are not all there, but a good number of the seventeen women who filed a complaint against this slender 38-year-old man wearing an afro, thin glasses and a small mustache came, Monday March 18, to the opening of the trial before the Paris criminal court of the man whom the chronicle nicknamed the “Tinder rapist”.
Thirteen accuse him of rape, four of sexual assault. The facts they denounce go from September 2014 to October 2016, the date of his arrest. These women, now in their thirties or almost, who were then young aspiring actresses or models wishing to build up a portfolio, gave the police almost similar stories of their meeting with Salim B., an aspiring fashion photographer: flattering words about dating sites, an invitation to their home for a shooting, the glass of alcohol that they do not always dare to refuse, the second drink, the strangely rapid and powerful intoxication – hair analyzes of more than half of the complainants present suspicious traces of drugs or medication -, the sudden change in attitude of their host, the verbal insistence, the psychological pressure, sometimes physical violence to achieve their ends, their indifference after having obtained satisfaction and their astonishment.
The young women – one of them was under 18 years old at the time of the first contacts – were all consenting, according to the accused, who was kind enough to acknowledge a “moral fault, that of having used them for one’s own pleasure and then rejecting them”, but no criminal offense. In his eyes, he repeated during the investigation, the complainants were necessarily willing to go further since his invitation mentioned the prospect of consuming alcohol. “This concept according to which a young woman who agrees to drink would thereby consent to acts of a sexual nature can only leave one perplexed”notes the investigating magistrate of this case in his indictment order.
“A form of industrialization of the meeting process”
Faced with investigators, Salim B. mentioned a “sex addiction”. From his glass box, he corrects: “At the time I spoke about sex addiction, I had no perspective. I have no sex addiction. The addiction I have is an addiction to seduction. » A few nervous laughs escape from the benches of the civil parties. “I have the impression that it does not generate support”quips the president of the court, Thierry Fusina. “What I liked, it was to create a new story, new things, persists the accused, imperturbable. It wasn’t the sex itself. »
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