The prosecution requested a sentence "not less than eight years" in prison against Bernard Preynat, tried in Lyon for having abused young scouts for twenty years. He appeared for assaults, up to "four to five" per week, according to his own confession, committed between 1971 and 1991 in Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon, the parish where he officiated, and during camps at the foreign. This file "amazing", "serious", "frightening", "deserves a firm criminal response that cannot stop for the benefit of age", launched Dominique Sauves, on the last day of the ex-priest's trial 74 years old.
"Over the period, it's been between 3000 and 4000, you're trying to judge a case to the nearest thousand sexual assaults, when one is enough to break the life of a man," was indignant Thursday at the hearing Me Jean Boudot, lawyer for a victim.
At his side, Me Emmanuelle Haziza demanded for his client that the defendant, 74 years old, be sentenced to a “heavy sentence” - he faces 10 years in prison. "Because you wiped out his childhood life, his adolescent life, his adult life. "
Defense Prescribed Facts
Bernard Preynat's lawyer, Me Frédéric Doyez, has already argued before the court that the facts against his client, committed between 1986 and 1991, were time-barred. "Thank God, they are not," retorted the lawyer of a victim, referring to the title of the film by François Ozon on the case and to a statement by Cardinal Barbarin who said the opposite.
At the time, the deadline was three years. It was subsequently increased to twenty years and its starting point shifted to the majority of the victims, which allowed certain victims of Preynat to file a complaint. According to the defense, however, there can be no retroactivity of the law. She had already taken legal action on this point during the procedure, without success.
Since the start of the trial, Bernard Preynat has clumsily asked for forgiveness, but often downplaying the facts detailed at the bar by nine of his victims - a tenth did not attend this trying hearing, but had cathartic virtues.
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On Wednesday, the former parish priest of Sainte-Foy-les-Lyon claimed to have himself been the victim of sexual assault in his youth. At the helm, he indicated that he had mentioned this in a letter addressed to the apostolic administrator Michel Dubost, who replaced Cardinal Philippe Barbarin in the management of the diocese of Lyon since his conviction in March for his silence on the Preynat case.
In this letter, written last summer at the time of his apostolic trial - after which he was expelled from the Church - Preynat said he had been "victim of a priest at the seminary, of a monitor who [the ] caressed in the shower. " He explains that he was successively sexually assaulted by a sacristan in his parish, a seminarian and a priest at the minor seminary between his sixth and fourth.
