Val-d’Oise: “When I come back to the room …”, a circumciser tried after disturbing testimonies

For 30 years, Gabriel Assouline performed more than 60% of Jewish circumcisions in Île-de-France. But in 2017, now about twenty women are testifying against him, indicating that they have suffered acts with sexual connotations. The man is tried by the criminal court of Val-d’Oise for sexual assaults and rape against four women between 2010 and 2017. Some of his wives have agreed to confide in our colleagues from Parisian. “After re-dressing my baby, he told me to lie down on the bed and take my bra off to check if my breasts were engorged. Seeing my embarrassment, he made me realize that he was doctor.”

The man will then ask her afterwards to take a shower. “I refuse, but he insists, he takes an authoritarian tone. I am terribly uncomfortable, I take it as quickly as possible to get rid of him. When I come back to the room, everything happens in seconds. He pulls down my panties and inserts his finger, he talks to me about the uterus without even looking at me, and I’m totally flabbergasted. Then he gets up and disappears”. Petrified, she will not be able to file a complaint. “He had a double ascendancy over the victims, both religious and medical, because he often presented himself as a dental surgeon. He most often targeted women with little knowledge of this type of practice or those with non-Jewish spouses”says Me Elie Korchia, lawyer for the civil parties.

The defendant denies the facts

The defendant, father of eight children, lives in Strasbourg where he is under judicial supervision. Gabriel Assouline “denies having had the slightest improper intention”, explains his defender, Me Francis Metzger. The lawyer wants as proof the “9,000 to 10,000 circumcisions performed without any problem”pleading a problem of interpretation.