In a book, the writer Edouard Louis told the story of a sexual assault by a lover on Christmas Eve in Paris.
Reality has joined fiction for several years now.
Indeed, four years in prison, two of which were closed, were requested by the prosecutor against a 35-year-old man, who said he was innocent, during a hearing at the Paris courthouse on Friday evening.
On the evening of December 25, 2012, Edouard Louis, then aged 20, filed a complaint for rape and attempted murder.
To the police, he reports having met in the street, around 3.30 am, a man named Reda, who accompanied him to his home.
The one who was not yet the famous author of "Ending Eddy Bellegueule", released a year later, recounts at the time having had consensual sex, before realizing that his tablet and his phone had disappeared.
Confused by his DNA
Confronted, Reda then became threatening, strangled him with a scarf and then raped, declares Edouard Louis, who adds that he managed to take refuge on the landing before his attacker left the scene.
This night, the writer will tell it later in a book, “History of violence”, published on January 7, 2016. Two days later, a suspect is accidentally arrested in another case and confused by his DNA.
At the end of the investigation, as in many cases of rape accusations, the facts were reclassified as "sexual assault", bringing the case before a court and not at the assizes.
"We do not judge a book, we judge the facts," warned the prosecutor at the opening of her indictment, calling for a "judicial truth" and not "literary" to be sought.
"I swear to French justice that there has never been violence"
Citing the medico-legal report, the “concordant versions” of Edouard Louis from “friends, police services, doctors”, she requested a 4-year sentence, 2 of which was suspended, with compulsory care.
"I swear to French justice that there has never been violence, even verbal violence," said the 35-year-old defendant earlier at the bar, released at the end of 2016 after eleven months in pre-trial detention.
This man born in Algeria, without papers, who spoke through the voice of an interpreter, refuted the strangulation and the rape: he admitted to having tried to steal the tablet but not the phone, claiming to have defended himself. a few minutes with Edouard Louis before leaving the apartment.
"There are only lies, I am exhausted," he said.
