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Koffi Olomide on appeal for sexual assault on four of his dancers

2021-10-23T08:41:34.332Z


The Congolese artist, star of rumba in the DRC, is also accused of having kidnapped young women in an Ile-de-France pavilion during his tours in France.


The Congolese artist Koffi Olomide, 65, is to be tried on Monday October 25 in Versailles for acts of sexual assault and the kidnapping of four of his former dancers between 2002 and 2006. The musician disputes these accusations.

At first instance, the Nanterre court had condemned him, in March 2019, to two years in prison for “sexual assault” on one of the young women, declared a minor at the time of the facts.

Read alsoKoffi Olomide sentenced to two years in prison for sexual assault on a minor

The prosecution, which had requested seven years' imprisonment, appealed against this sentence. The singer, a rumba star in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), had been acquitted of the charges concerning the other three dancers. Two men, presented by the prosecution as henchmen, prosecuted for complicity and released in Nanterre, must also be retried.

Koffi Olomide, whose real name is Antoine Agbepa Mumba, had not appeared at his trial nor, previously, at two meetings during the investigation, causing the issuance of an arrest warrant.

Asked by AFP, the defendant's lawyer, Me Emmanuel Marsigny, did not wish to comment on the presence or not of his client during this next hearing, scheduled for Monday at 2 p.m.

The judgment will be reserved at a later date.

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The trial at first instance was held behind closed doors.

This will not be the case this time, the civil parties not having requested it.

The latter

"are counting on the presence of Mr. Olomide"

after an instruction in which he

"largely evaded justice"

, told AFP Me David Desgranges, who defends three of the four dancers.

As for the music industry, the concert hall of La Défense Arena, near Paris, announced Thursday, October 21 the cancellation of Koffi Olomide's concert scheduled for November 27.

Tours in France

In 2007, a first dancer lodged a complaint and described to the courts her tours with Koffi Olomidé in France.

She says she lives them locked up near Paris, in a pavilion watched by three guards, without the possibility of going out or making a phone call.

The other three, who file a complaint in 2009 and 2013, will confirm this story, according to the prosecution.

According to the story of the dancers - including one who assures us that she was a minor at the time - to justice, they were sometimes brought to a hotel room or to a recording studio so that the singer would force them to have sex.

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One of them reports that she suffered the scene twice a week.

Another says that she let it go so as not to lose her job as a dancer.

In June 2006, they escaped together from the Ile-de-France pavilion with a rope of sheet after having put the guards to sleep using sleeping pills, according to their story.

Initially indicted for aggravated rape and forcible confinement in 2012, Koffi Olomide finally saw the investigating judge send him back in 2018 to the criminal court for "sexual assault with violence, constraint, threat or surprise by a person in authority" - or sexual assault - and sequestration.

He is also on trial for illegal aid in the entry and stay of dancers from the DRC.

"It is a file which does not hold"

, insists Me Emmanuel Marsigny to defend his client,

"an accusation is not a proof"

.

The lawyer points out that at first instance, the court

"made a litter of almost all of the charges: he was convicted of facts

[dated]

2002 and 2003 on one of the young women,

[which he]

contests ”

.

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Born in 1956 in the Great Lakes region of the DRC, Koffi Olomidé was already sentenced in his country in 2012 to three months suspended prison sentence for violence against his producer.

He was also expelled from Kenya in 2016 for having kicked one of his dancers, and Zambia had issued an arrest warrant in 2018 against him for assaulting a photographer in 2012.

Source: lefigaro

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