A gendarme of the Oise was sentenced Wednesday in Senlis to seven months in prison suspended for sexual assault and sexist insult against three young subordinates. This gendarme, born in 1962, will be registered in the file of perpetrators of sexual and violent offenses (Fijais) and will have to pay three fines of 500 euros each and compensate the victims.
He had been denounced by three student gendarmes who worked under his orders at the Ribécourt-Dreslincourt brigade. "Your lipstick makes old whore", "you are dressed like a fart": the remarks in question were made while the chief warrant officer was brigade commander, between August 2021 and January 2023. One of the victims received a hand on the buttocks from his supervisor, another was told: "You put on your pants that mold your little ass".
"It's a criminal offence"
The young women had not dared to say anything. "He was the one who graded us," one of them testified at the hearing. They finally opened up to their guardian. The gendarmerie of Compiègne then informed the prosecutor's office. At the hearing, the defendant downplayed the facts. "The military have very free conversations, I use the vocabulary of my audience," he justified. Hand to buttocks? "It was a 'fries', a kid's gesture, spontaneous and not calculated. It's a command fault," he said. "It's a criminal fault," cut the president, Olivier Michelet.
Prosecutor Loïc Abrial stressed that the defendant had "taken advantage of his hierarchical situation". "My client did not think to suffer such devastating facts in the gendarmerie," lamented the lawyer of one of the women, Me Carine Barba-Stelmach. "We must put things in their context," pleaded in defense, Me Mouna Taoufik. "It's like that at the brigade. It's salacious from morning to night. My client has adapted." Before being tried, the soldier had already been sanctioned by the gendarmerie. Detached to Noyon, he was finally transferred to the Pont-Sainte-Maxence brigade before receiving a reprimand decided by the Ministry of the Interior. A sanction that freezes his career for five years.
