Flirtatious or rapist? The trial of the curious father

“Was his action gentle when he grabbed your face?” asks President Dominique Coquizart.

“No, sudden, violent. Then he touched my hair, my breasts. It hurt. Then he moved his hand to my hips, forcing me open. He touched my penis, pulled the hairs, put his finger in, several times. No, it wasn’t nice. Yes, I asked him to stop.

This scene was described before the Haute-Garonne regional criminal court on the afternoon of August 25, 2019, in a car parked in a dead-end street in the Saint-Simon district of Toulouse. “There was no one there,” the young girl says.

One rape, five sexual assaults

When she got home, she called the police. “To warn them that there was a strange man driving around Toulouse in a big car. I thought I had just been sexually assaulted, not raped.”

In the criminal court, Hocine does not move. When he was arrested a month later, on September 21, the police officer who conducted the investigations “was calm, very cold,” he says. Under the authority of the investigating judge, this investigator contacted the people who owned the suspect’s phone numbers. And we identified the other seven victims. At the end of the investigation, two people were dismissed. There are five people, including three who condemned the rapes in support of the person who spoke on the benches of the civil party.

It is not easy to look at the defendant. And to listen to his determined lawyers. Franck Berton, who is defending together with Luc Abratkiewicz, asks, “How many of the 11,232 calls made in a year have you reached?”

“It was too much. Numbers were no longer allocated, others did not want to answer, still others did not want to hear from the police,” explains the researcher, who had previously worked alone, following his arrest.

Just “a little heavy flirting…”

Enough to make this police officer a suspect in the eyes of the defense. Only the stories are similar: encounters on the street, a divorced man from Marseille, an excessive taste for phone calls. A man already married, a father of four, constantly harassed by a mistress who thought he was alone. “I was a bit of a flirt at the time,” admits Hocine, 40.

But in this man’s eyes there is nothing else. No aggression, no harassment, no hands touching breasts, no fingers or penises intruding on the privacy of four young women. The victims struggle not to tremble. In response, they leave the audience in anger. Then come back, listen without looking at the person in the box.

The first one that triggered the investigation remains flat. Calm, clear, this young woman confirms that she gave “this kiss on the lips to be able to leave” despite being in deep depression in the summer of 2019, that her number was given “to get rid of”, that her address was fake, that it was “forwarded to end”. Her lawyer, Me Lise Daujam, supports her.

Attorney General Guilhem Renoux, who supports the investigator and the victims, is already scrapping the defense. The arguments promise to be tense. Undeterred, President Dominique Coquizart calms down, raises questions, asks them again. The voices of the five victims have not yet been heard. The court judges have until Wednesday to form their own convictions.