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“Justice pour Julie” (Justice for Julie) was requested by the almost 300 French protesters who, on Sunday, in the rain and despite the situation of the pandemic, gathered in Place Saint-Michel, meters from the Palace of Justice , in support of the woman who gives the name – albeit fictitious – to the motto of the protest.
At stake is the story of a young woman, now 25, who accuses 20 men from the Paris Fire Department for having raped her several times during two years, when she was between 13 and 15 years old. More than a decade later, only three suspects were investigated and charged. And the guilt alleged by the family fell on deaf ears when a judge considered the involvement between the then minor and the suspects as “consensual sex.” In a diary written at the time, Julie said “terrified and paralyzed with fear”, in a “vegetable” state. The process continues in court.
To explain the case, it is necessary to go back to 2008, when Julie (not her real name) was assisted by a firefighter from the Bourg-la-Reine barracks, after feeling bad during a class. Pierre, who was 20 years old at the time, asked her for personal and contact details and weeks later began sending “loving messages” that soon turned into abusive video calls, the family says. When Pierre asked Julie to undress for the camera, the youngest obeyed and days later the cell phone number was circulating to the rest of the fire department, he writes “Le Parisien”. Vulnerable because of her age and the strong cocktail of drugs she was taking for the anxiety she was fighting, the teenager will have begun to continually suffer forced sexual acts there, in which 19 other men have been involved, she says.
Firefighters called the home of the little ones 130 times
In that two-year descent into hell, Julie saw her physical and mental health deteriorate, say the authorities who investigated the case. The anxiety attacks worsened, the seizures became more frequent and with them also the visits of the firefighters – between 2008 and 2010 they will have gone 130 times to the child’s home, says the defense of the young woman. Julie was afraid to leave the house and began taking very strong anti-anxiety medications.
Only in August 2010, a month after stopping part of the medication, would he come to tell her what had happened to his mother. On the same day, Corinne Leriche complained to the police against a total of 20 firefighters in Paris. The reports fell like bombs one after another. Only then did she realize that that day in January 2009, when Pierre showed up at her house to see how Julie was doing, he raped her. Corinne trusted Pierre and was grateful for the attention and time that the firefighters apparently devoted to her daughter, so that day, she left the house to walk the dog. “I thought he was the last person to do such a thing, because he helped her a lot and saw how vulnerable she was”Corinne lamented to investigators. Later, in November of that year, Pierre, dressed in a firefighter’s uniform, took Julie home, where he allegedly abused again. On the same day, two colleagues will have done the same to you while watching pornography, read in “The Guardian”.
“Consensual sexual relations under the age of 15”
Six months after the complaint, the three men were charged with “rape of a minor”, but no action was taken against the remaining 17 (four who were present in one of the alleged crimes were even accused of negligence , but the charges were dropped). . During the interrogation, two of the suspects admitted to having had “group sex” with Julie during the service and another admitted to having had sex in a bathroom of a hospital where the youngest was admitted. But all spoke of consensual sex and denied signs of vulnerability.
In 2019, eight years after the judicial investigation began, the appointed judge decided to drop the rape charges and replace them with “consensual penetrative sex in children under 15 years old.” Julie tried to commit suicide. The family rejected the decision and took the case to the Versailles Court of Appeal, which again last November found that Julie had consented to sexual acts. The last hope now rests with the Supreme Court, the highest court in the French judicial system, which must evaluate, on Wednesday, Julie’s defense appeal, which demands that the 20 attackers be charged with rape.
Under French law, a person in a position of superiority / authority who has sexual relations with a person under the age of 18 is committing a crime. But for a rape charge to proceed, the plaintiff must prove that he was coerced or violently coerced. Otherwise, the suspect can only be charged with sexual assault. The maximum penalty for the first offense is 20 years. In the second case, there are seven.
In 2018, after several protests, a change in the law was proposed calling for the introduction of an age of consent, which would mean that engaging in sexual acts with someone under the age of 15 would be considered rape. But the law was not approved, after a government report concluded that the scenario would lead to a “presumption of guilt.”
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