France 2: the Laëtitia Perrais affair, the appalling fate of a young martyr

January 2011, in a small town in Loire-Atlantique.

Laëtitia Perrais, 18, disappears.

Two days later, Tony Meilhon, a criminal already convicted of rape and violence with a weapon, is arrested for the murder of the young woman.

The dismembered body of the victim will be recovered from two water points located fifty kilometers from each other.

The case is causing a stir.

Nicolas Sarkozy goes to the front to denounce the laxity of the judges who dared to release a sex offender without ensuring that he was well followed.

The magistrates go on strike.

But the monstrosity of the Tony Meilhon affair, the media and political boom it generates mask the complexity of a singular story.

That of Laëtitia and her twin sister Jessica.

Two lives marked by the violence of men and which the gendarmes in charge of the investigation patiently traced back to understand what, one winter evening, led a very young adult to throw herself into the mouth of the wolf.

A violent father

In the life of these two little girls, there is first Franck, their father, who hits and rapes their mother.

A father who, exasperated by the cries of his daughters, grabs Laëtitia and threatens to throw her out of the balcony.

A father who, once out of prison, regains custody of the twins because their mother, knocked out by sedatives, is unable to take care of it.

An overwhelmed father, subject to bloodletting, who ends up having to give up the exercise of his paternity.

Entrusted to social services, the two girls land, at the age of 12, in a foster family.

Little by little, they are rebuilding themselves, going up the slope at school, making friends.

Laëtitia, the most silent, the most shy, flourishes, obtains a waitress CAP.

But the violence is still there, rampant.

A tormented soul

In the foster family, the father, Gilles Patron, an authoritarian man, an authoritarian man, considers Laëtitia as less than nothing and rapes his sister.

Facts for which he will be sentenced to eight years in prison in 2014. In Laëtitia's tormented soul, the shadow threatens to stifle the light.

The young woman puts down her distress and suicidal thoughts on paper.

Until the evening when she follows Tony Meilhon, a disreputable man, into a bar.

The young girl, who usually does not use drugs or alcohol, accepts the drinks and cocaine he offers her and gets into her car.

He takes her in his trailer and rapes her, then walks her back to the bar where she left her scooter.

But, armed with unconscious courage, she threatens to denounce him to the police.

Tony follows her, knocks her down and kills her.

This overwhelming fate, this ordinary life plagued by violence, historian Ivan Jablonka has made a book, "Laëtitia ou la Fin des hommes", published at Le Seuil in 2016. Jean-Xavier de Lestrade has adapted this survey to the screen.

A fiction in six episodes which will be broadcast on France 2, on September 21 and 28.

Told with modesty and delicacy, but without silencing or sanitizing anything, it touches the heart.

And very accurately traces the story of a young girl broke in full rebirth.