A former French professor in Singapore was sentenced Tuesday in Paris to twenty years of criminal imprisonment, with a two-thirds security period, for having sexually abused 25 Malaysian children, aged 10 to 17, between January 2014 and October 2017.
The Paris Departmental Criminal Court (CCD) followed to the letter the requisitions of the prosecution, which had demanded the maximum penalty provided for by law against Jean-Christophe Quenot. Mr. Quenot was also sentenced to twenty years of socio-judicial monitoring at the end of his sentence. He will be punished with a sentence of seven years in prison if he does not respect this obligation, the court warned.
“I want to express my regret for the harm I caused to my victims”
“It is a very severe sentence which is explained by the extreme seriousness of the facts and the number of victims,” the president of the court, Laurent Raviot, told the accused. “Do you understand it? », he asked her. “Yes,” replied Mr. Quenot. “However, this does not mean that things are definitively closed for you,” added the president, “we must consolidate the work recently begun in detention” of monitoring perpetrators of sexual offenses. The convicted person has ten days to appeal.
“I want to express my regrets for the harm I caused to my victims,” declared Jean-Christophe Quenot, who will celebrate his 56th birthday at the end of the month, before the court retires to deliberate.
A former teacher of French as a foreign language in Singapore, Mr. Quenot is suspected of having abused at least fifty children in South-East Asia between the early 1990s and his arrest in flagrante delicto in Bangkok in February 2019 Arrested and detained in France in March 2019 after managing to illegally leave Thailand, he was only tried in Paris for the events that occurred in Malaysia.
Before his flight to France, he took care to send his notebooks and hard drives with tens of thousands of child pornography photos and videos from Malaysia. Investigators discovered 100,000 concerning his pedophile “activities” in Malaysia alone.
” Unsustainable “
Friday, on the first day of the trial, Véronique Béchu, head of the group responsible for the fight against child crime at the headquarters of the judicial police in Nanterre, stressed that the 5,000 hours of viewing these videos had plunged the investigators of her department into the ‘horror. “We watch child criminal content every day, but this was particularly sickening,” she said.
Jean-Christophe Quenot systematically filmed his antics and meticulously described his sexual practices in notebooks “like an archivist”, “without any emotion”, noted the president of the CCD.
During the hearing, Mr. Quenot admitted that he paid children, in a weak state and often drugged with glue, to satisfy his fantasies. The reading of extracts from his notebooks at the hearing proved “unbearable”, in the words of the president.
“Incredibles”
Based in Singapore then Malaysia, he regularly traveled in search of child prostitutes in Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
During his interrogation on Monday, Mr. Quenot explained that he thought the young boys he raped were “indestructible”. “They knew the street, an environment where people fight. They sometimes arrived with incredible wounds, but always smiling. I had the impression that nothing touched them. And for me, they had the choice not to join me,” he argued.
“Rape is incredibly violent,” a lawyer for the civil parties pointed out to him. “Yes, of course,” the accused admitted half-heartedly. “There are several degrees of violence and I am not at the top of the scale,” he defended himself. During the hearing, Mr. Quenot said that he now realized that he had been “totally wrong” in negotiating sexual favors for money.