The trigger came in 2017, with a report on the #MeToo movement, calling for victims of rape and sexual assault to speak out.
As long as you speak before the statute of limitations.
For sexual abuse of a child under 15, it is within 20 years after reaching the age of majority, i.e. 38 years.
Elisa
(her first name has been changed)
is 35 years old.
“The clock was ticking,” this woman, now 41 years old, told us this Tuesday, between two doors, at the Paris judicial court, where the trial of the man who “damaged” her forever is taking place.
The man is 94 years old and was represented by a lawyer.
The judges are deliberating.
The bell rings, the hearing resumes.
Elisa returns to the front row and lets out a big sigh of relief: Teddy B. is found guilty of molesting her for seven years, when she was between 5 and 12 years old.
The court estimated she had been assaulted more than 200 times.
He was sentenced to five years in prison, given his age and state of health.
At the end of the 1980s, Elisa's parents had just moved to the east of Paris.
They were looking for a nanny for Elisa and her youngest brother, their eldest being already a teenager.
In the neighborhood, they recommend the caretaker from the nearby high school.
She lives in the facility with her husband.
Quickly and for a long time for Elisa's family, they will remain “grandma and grandpa”.
Children are looked after in the evenings, on Wednesdays and during holidays.
If the nanny happens to run an errand, her husband watches over the little ones.
He works in the automobile industry, runs a judo gym and loves talking about Thailand.
Tickets against the silence of the child
Often, he suggests that his little brother go play in the yard and stays alone with Elisa, on whom he imposes a “ritual” that she has kept quiet for all these years: she has to undress, he makes her touch her, masturbates.
“A tipping point arrives when you are in CE1 or CE2,” explains the president of the 15th chamber who takes up all of Elisa’s statements with infinite attention.
You become aware of the abnormality, you confide after a difficult night, you cried a lot and you tell him that you are going to talk about it to your parents and there, under the seal of secrecy he asks you not to talk about it.
He pays you after each touch, with a 50 or 100 franc note.
» With the money, Elisa buys gifts for her little brother.
Her grandmother is surprised by this note, she talks about it to Elisa's mother who tries to find out if something is wrong, but the child says nothing.
“She was too afraid of making a mess,” a 6th grade friend who discovered the dark secret would later testify.
She too was abused.
“Between victims, we support each other,” she will say.
Almost a teenager, Elisa suggests to her parents that she look after her little brother herself, she is too afraid that he will suffer the same thing.
Elisa, the “secretive, reserved, trying not to make waves” sister, who “isolates herself to manage her emotions”.
The girl “attentive to people, modest and always very accommodating”.
Her parents don't understand why she doesn't want to send her happy new year wishes to Grandma and Grandpa.
She collapses at a family meal
Elisa meets Teddy B. again at a birthday party, she is suffocating, it is impossible to talk to him, she has difficulty breathing.
He stretches his hand towards her arm, she dissuades him: “You don’t touch me.”
That was the last time she saw him.
She ends up exploding during a family meal.
That day, Elisa's mother is worried about a young guest who does not seem well, she advises her to talk about her torments.
It’s Elisa who literally collapses.
Her parents and brothers believe her.
The investigating judge too.
Paris Criminal Court, Tuesday February 6.
For Me Charles Morel, Elisa's lawyer, sexual violence is “more than a scourge, a massacre, a major public health problem”.
LP/Carole Sterlé
When Elisa filed a complaint in 2017, she became a mother.
Teddy B. is already 87 years old.
To speed up the procedure, Me Charles Morel files a complaint with the creation of a civil party.
“We had to mess with his head, we can't know what's going on in the heads of the kids,” contests the retiree, heard by video by the judge.
“She was always sitting on the floor, she was getting into positions a bit... With her legs spread.
She could have been raped if she had come across someone with a head problem, not like me.
I know I never did anything.
» Questioned by the investigating judge, his daughters and his wife are stunned, “but Elisa could not have confabulated”, says the wife, 67 years of marriage.
“He will take his secrets and his lies to his grave,” criticizes Me Charles Morel, Elisa’s lawyer, at the hearing.
“When we appear for acts more than thirty years old, and we are no longer able to explain ourselves, it is not satisfactory, neither for the accused, nor for the victim,” believes the lawyer of Teddy B. who had, in vain, invoked the prescription of the facts before the investigating chamber.
“I only wanted him to roast in hell”
“The facts are not prescribed,” contests the prosecutor, who requires five years in prison with probationary suspension.
“It is rare to have so many elements of context, a constant and detailed statement,” insists the representative of the prosecution.
Elisa's psychologist also testified during the investigation.
The difficulty in discussing the facts, the trauma, his guilt, everything gives credibility to the accusations.
“He's not here but it's your moment of justice,” the president says to Elisa, who oscillates at the bar between tears and smiles of relief.
“Thank you for including all of these elements.
I have no interest in being here if I hadn't suffered everything he put me through.
It was long, painful, tortuous to get there.
In addition to these traumas that I still carry, the suffering of waiting until then, I was caught in a paradox so that he could stay alive until the trial, while I only had one desire, that he's roasting in hell.
I built myself on shifting sands.
I feel wobbly.
I will be damaged all my life, this stage with you will do me good.
» Huddled on a bench, her husband, her little brother, her mother and her 6th grade friend listen with tight throats.
The retiree, who has ten days to appeal, will also have to compensate him in the amount of 10,000 euros in compensation for the suffering endured, 13,000 euros for therapy undertaken for more than five years, 1,500 euros for sexual harm.