Le Figaro Marseille
“I have been a prostitute since the age of 14”
.
Myriam* calmly releases the sentence in front of the Marseille criminal court.
Myriam is now almost an adult (she will be 18 this summer).
At the bar of the seventh room, the young girl's words come in fragments.
Between two silences, the teenager talks about pimping with a disconcerting naturalness.
“I am a minor.
I don't have a bank card, all that, so I've always worked with people, never alone.
I was with a boy before.
I escaped from him because he was too violent and I went with other boys.”
The other boys Myriam is talking about are right next to her, on the dock.
Three young men aged around twenty, all three of whom appear on trial for pimping.
At the time of the events, Myriam was only 15 years old.
The police found her one day in 2022 in an apartment in the 11th arrondissement of Marseille where she said she was locked up.
The alert was given by the friend of an acquaintance of Myriam.
“I prostituted myself and I didn’t take a single euro,”
explains Myriam.
I consented.
I have always worked.
There was no sexual forcing or anything.
I agreed to work, but not for free.”
It is not Myriam, but the president of the court who will speak of the rape suffered by the young girl in Toulouse by a stranger, the year she turned 14.
Or the year from which she begins prostitution.
The president also mentions the young girl's multiple runs away during adolescence, her dropping out of school since third grade, and her hospitalization in psychiatry.
While Christel Estienne-Garcia reads the facts (in a mechanical tone), the young girl's legs, molded into leather pants, tremble, and her eyes, adorned with long false eyelashes, stare at the ground.
Also read “They forced my 15-year-old daughter to do a series of passes”: the hell of city pimping, orchestrated by small-time drug dealers
Cannon fodder
“What does it mean to consent to prostitution at barely 15 years old?”
asks the public prosecutor, Tamara Elbaz.
What does it mean to consent to sexual intercourse, to giving your body when you are barely 15 years old and have a complicated background, when you have already been a prostitute?”
Myriam listens to the prosecutor, stunned, her arms tight against her stomach.
“We are like cannon fodder for these adults.
What is striking in this case is the way in which this young girl is treated.
It’s cannon fodder, a profitable tool that allows you to make money.”
At 15, fleeing a violent pimp, Myriam went to her father in Saint-Nazaire.
There, she wrote to a certain Abderrahmane B., with whom she had interacted in the past, exclusively on social networks.
The man rents a car and crosses France to pick her up, in the company of two other men.
According to Myriam, the young people agree to work together and share the income from her sexual services.
An ad on a specialized site is posted.
“But I shouldn’t have gone to Marseille
,” explains the teenager, who finds herself trapped.
Arriving in this city where she is not from, the young girl follows customers, up to ten per day, in a furnished tourist rental from which she is only allowed to escape within a “
small area”. »
.
“She was 15, the age of my little brother, it’s as if I had custody of him,”
explains Mohamed B., one of the defendants.
I am... What do you say again?
Responsible."
Faced with insistent questions from the court, the young girl often admits that she no longer remembers.
“Were you consuming narcotics at the time of the events?”
asks Me Djamel Bouguessa, Myriam’s lawyer, to his client.
“Yes,”
replied the young girl.
Cocaine and weed.
The shit was five or six joints a day.
I also took balloons
, the name given for the consumption of nitrous oxide.
“When she returned home from her runaways, for a few days, a few months at most, Myriam told her mother about the influence and dependence, on alcohol, on gas tanks, on hash, on cocaine,”
reports the 'lawyer for Sarah*, Myriam's mother.
“Myriam is a teenager with a tumultuous and prostitution life,”
summarizes Me Lions.
She is a 14-year-old girl who finds herself involved in prostitution networks.
Three years of daily life for my client of constant interrogations and torture.”
A tear appears at the corner of Myriam's luscious lips, while Sarah sobs.
“Can you imagine for a mother when she discovers on TikTok not only ads, prices, but also images that feature her daughter who is a prostitute?
My client will tell you: initially, Manon was a tomboy.
Today, she has this physique that we sadly find, like duplicates, in all cases of prostitution of minors.”
“My client went through hell
,” says Me Djamel Bouguessa.
Former drug traffickers
“And the defendants today absolutely do not care,”
accuses Me Lions.
These three have understood one thing well: that doing minor prostitution 2.0 is practical, flexible, mobile, with a certain immediacy.
And above all, it costs less in the criminal court than drug trafficking.”
The three defendants indeed have a long record, with participation in drug trafficking networks, particularly in Marseille.
Two of them appear already detained in other cases.
According to investigators, Mohamed B. was the gang's logistician, liaising with customers.
He also paid Amine D., who was responsible for staying in the apartment to monitor both Myriam and her clients.
The third, Abderrahmane B., the only one to appear free, was the
“manager”
of the case.
Before the criminal court, the defendants denied the acts of kidnapping.
Only Mohamed B. half-heartedly acknowledges the acts of pimping.
“Would you have prostituted your brother who was the same age as Myriam at the time of the events?”
, asks Tamara Elbaz provocatively to Mohamed B.
“Of course not
,” the young man retorts with a laugh.
The defendants' lawyers are pleading for acquittal, highlighting in particular insufficient evidence in the case.
After a two and a half hour recess, the court acquitted the defendants of the kidnapping charges.
On the other hand, they were sentenced to between three and four years in prison for aggravated pimping.
An arrest warrant is issued against Abderrahmane B., who was absent at the time of the deliberations.
“A new life is opening up for my client today
,” Mr. Bouguessa pleaded at the bar.
Myriam stopped running away and returned home at the beginning of the year, with the plan of starting beauty studies.
Before the criminal court, his first word on the stand was intended to be a message of hope.
“Today I am fine.”