The lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, who defended the leader of the
“Barbarians gang”
Youssouf Fofana or the Venezuelan terrorist Carlos, whom she married in prison, died Friday at the age of 70, we learned from a of his loved ones. She died Friday morning from cancer, said this relative, a lawyer, confirming information from
Marianne
.
In 45 years of career, this unclassifiable criminal lawyer was notably the lawyer of the serial killer Charles Sobhraj alias
“the Serpent”
, whom she went to welcome at the end of 2022 on his return to France, after 20 years in prison in Nepal. She also defended the polemicist Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala, the writer Gabriel Matzneff, accused of child molestation, and Ali Riza Polat, sentenced to thirty years in prison for
"complicity"
in the attacks against Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Kosher in January 2015.
“Young woman from a good family”
, as she defined herself in a portrait that the AFP dedicated to her in 2011, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre had an early life, bourgeois and orderly. Married at 21 to Michel Peyre, who was deputy mayor of Granville, she had three children with him. The couple separated in 1993.
A great “intellectual complicity”
In 1979, she took the oath and specialized in business law. It was then that she met the sulphurous lawyer Jacques Vergès (died in 2013), who shared the
“same insolence”
with her , but whom she said she did not consider as her
“mentor”
. In 1997, in a corridor of La Santé prison, she met Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, an episode recounted in an extremely romantic manner in his book
“Marrying Carlos”
, published in 2004.
On August 25, 2001, she recounts,
“we proposed to each other. (...) And he recited the Fatiha, the Koranic profession of faith, to better seal this solemn commitment
. In her eyes, Carlos, whom she compared to Nelson Mandela, was
“not a criminal”
but
“a politician. A freedom fighter, a revolutionary
.
In March 2004, during a talk show on France 2, she spoke of the
“very deep”
feelings and the great
“intellectual complicity”
which united her with her companion. Asked about the difficulty of having physical relations with him within the prison, she replied with humor:
“I have an absolutely ideal husband who leaves me free every night”
.