Twelve defendants, including four detainees and one on the run, targeted by an arrest warrant, more than forty young women exploited according to the investigation: the Pontoise Criminal Court has been judging since Wednesday morning, and for four days, a vast network of prostitution.
Prosecuted for aggravated pimping, the alleged pimps, aged 22 to 40, were arrested after an investigation by the gendarmes which began in Beaumont-sur-Oise in February 2018.
This network had largely gone beyond the local framework.
Prostitution also took place in Soisy, Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Pontoise and Champagne in the Val-d'Oise, in apartments often rented by Airbnb or in hotels.
The clearly voluntary activity of young women also taking place in Yvelines, Hauts-de-Seine, Toulon (Var), Tours (Indre-et-Loire), Rouen (Seine-Maritime) or Bordeaux (Gironde) ...
"It was common knowledge in Beaumont"
The investigation began on February 16, 2018 when young A, 18, crossed the threshold of the Persian gendarmerie. She denounces the facts to the military, explaining that she wants to leave the network. She had met one of the respondents in the Boyenval district, in Beaumont. She is a fragile young woman, already hospitalized in psychiatry and who will be again. She particularly describes the apartment on rue de la Heuse, in the city center, where five or six girls would be under the control of F., 40 years old.
The central office for the repression of human trafficking is seized of the investigation with the gendarmes.
The first testimony then makes it possible to identify other girls, then other pimps, initially located in Beaumont.
There is in particular S., who carries out the same activity in a studio on rue Édmond-Turcq.
"It was common knowledge in Beaumont," says one of the girls heard by investigators.
Over the course of the investigations, the investigation widens to other pimps targeted by other procedures, revealing a network, without however retaining the organized gang or the criminal association.
Pimps, bodyguards, a secretariat ...
The survey classically describes network heads, bodyguards "responsible for controlling, monitoring or even coercing young women", but also ensuring their supplies and transport.
There is also the secretariat needed to post the announcements on the escort websites.
The survey even speaks of a "market study" carried out to determine the places in France where prostitution would not be very developed to be established there.
What would have also failed in Strasbourg (Bas-Rhin), due to more competition than expected.
The survey thus describes a very mobile network, capable of quickly renting apartments and launching advertisements.
According to the survey, 42 young women were involved in this network, up to 25 at the same time.
Often in difficulty, desocialized and without income, they are 19 to 20 years old on average (one of them was 15), earning from prostitution between 600 and 800 euros per day, which they share with their pimp .
Some speak of recurrent humiliation, of violence more rarely.
"You have to push him to the limit to annoy him" said one of the escorts about his pimp.
Most of them do this for the money.
One of them thus evokes "the trivialization of prostitution".
One of the defendants arrested with 14,000 euros
Among the alleged pimps on trial, S., 27, was arrested in an Airbnb in Ivry (Val-de-Marne) with 14,000 euros in cash in a bag.
On the first day of the hearing, this Wednesday, he does not dispute having managed 6 or 7 girls, but refutes any violence.
“I had lost my job, I had separated from my partner.
It is the greed.
I'm not proud of it, ”he explains.
He says he did not recruit his daughters: “They asked me to help them.
It was done step by step, by discussing ... I did not encourage them to do that, on the contrary.
"He suggests an almost improvised and dilettante activity, but lets slip the words of" planning "or" estimated budget ".
He finally ensures that he is not aware of a network, explains that he ignores what the other defendants were doing, whom he sometimes knows.
Three civil party associations
“You talk about forecasting, planning, as if it were an activity like any other.
But it is the commodification of the female body!
»Answers the prosecutor.
“You are unemployed and your first idea is pimping rather than drugs or cars.
"Because I was asked", assures the defendant.
No young woman was present at the court hearing and did not become a civil party in this trial, unlike three associations: Agir contre la prostitution des enfants (ACPE), Action teams against prostitution, and ECPAT, the French branch of End Child Prostitution and Trafficking, an international network mobilized against the sexual exploitation of children.