For the third time, they will have to relive the horror of rape, recount their meeting with Florian Varin and recount in detail the night that turned their lives upside down. Sentenced twice, in 2015 and then in 2018, to thirty years in prison for six rapes and an attempted murder, their executioner indeed obtained in September 2019 the annulment of his conviction on appeal due to a procedural flaw. . Now 30 years old, Florian Varin, nicknamed "the backpacker of rape", is therefore retried in Montauban (Tarn-et-Garonne) this week. "It is inevitably difficult for the victims, underlines Me Guy Debuisson, who defends a woman raped in October 2012. They must relive a scene which they would like to forget, this obviously slows down their reconstruction. "
In less than a year, between December 2011 and November 2012, from Brittany to Toulouse via Charente-Maritime or Deux-Sèvres, Florian Varin is accused of having raped six times.
All his victims “relate facts with great similarities between them: meeting on the edge of an ice rink or discotheque, request for a hug, hair pulling, cervical pressure and strangulation, masturbation, finger caresses, sodomy, practice of sodomy. asking the victims to moan, recording of the sexual intercourse, crying after the commission of the rapes… ”underlines the order of indictment to highlight the serial character of Varin's acts.
Marie, left for dead in a garbage container
To retrace Florian Varin's career, we must start with his fall, in November 2012, in Toulouse (Haute-Garonne). In the early morning of November 4, a young woman regains consciousness in a garbage container. Marie was strangled, punched, thrown against a wall by a man who entered her building lobby after spending the evening in a nightclub. 25-year-old Marie explains to the police that her attacker asked her for a "hug" before hitting and raping her. A few days after this horror scene, Florian Varin is arrested. He left his DNA on the door handle of the garbage room and is formally identified by Marie. In police custody, he ensures that he does not remember anything ... then recognizes the rape. The "dead believer",he decided to deposit it in a garbage container… "He nevertheless disputes the homicidal intention", underline My Alexandre Martin and Emmanuelle Franck, his lawyers.
A worrying personality, marked according to experts by a "sociopathic dimension" and the resurgence of "aggressive sexual impulses", Florian Varin was placed in pre-trial detention in November 2012. His profile pushes investigators to delve into his past.
Salvac software, designed to reconcile crimes according to their modus operandi, and genetic analyzes bring to the fore long-hidden attacks.
In early 2012, a young woman had thus filed a complaint against Varin and accused the young man of having raped her in December 2011 after a meeting at the Rennes ice rink (Ille-et-Vilaine).
Repeated legal failures
Even more disturbing: the Toulouse police officers discover that the DNA which allowed them to identify Varin has been known since April 2012. It had been taken as part of a rape complaint filed in Morbihan by Claire, 17 years old. Placed in custody, Varin had pleaded the consented relationship and convinced the investigators thanks to a video on which he forced the young woman to simulate the pleasure. "You do what I want because you have no choice", he launched yet to his victim on this video. "This is why it is a rape, because I have no choice", replied the young woman. The complaint had been closed. Four months later, Varin assaulted a new woman in La Rochelle.
This DNA, justice had been reluctant to analyze it after the rape of Pauline, 24, on September 16, 2012 at the exit of a Rennes nightclub.
“This failure of justice is a trauma for my client, underlines her lawyer, Me Frank Berton.
She suffers from having to tell her story again, to see once again that rapes could have been avoided.
"In fact, the genetic traces collected on Pauline's body on the evening of her attack will not be analyzed and linked to Varin - whose DNA was known since Claire's attack six months earlier - only after Marie's rape. in Toulouse, in November 2012.
His lawyers assure that he has "evolved"
Meanwhile, on October 14 and 25, 2012, Varin raped two other women, in Charente-Maritime and Niort (Deux-Sèvres).
Victims approached, there too, after evenings in nightclub or at the exit of the skating rink… Despite this specific modus operandi, these cases had never been connected before the arrest of Varin.
After having long talked about consensual relations, the young man admitted all the rapes during his two trials.
He should do the same this week.
“He explains, now verbalizes things, underline his lawyers.
The question of this trial concerns above all the sentence.
Thirty years in prison, is that still suitable for this man, who has evolved and has done an important job on himself since his incarceration?
"
