He remains seated, stoic, as if insensitive to the testimonies of his numerous victims. When you speak to him, he answers questions with precision. In the box of the accused at the Assize Court of Ille-et-Vilaine, Sébastien C. seems to remember everything. He recognizes “90% of the facts” with which he is accused but forcefully denies certain acts that are attributed to him. Judged for two weeks in Rennes, this 36-year-old former magician is accused of multiple rapes and sexual assaults. In total, twenty-seven children aged 3 to 15 were identified by the investigators. Some live in the Rennes region, where the magician lived for a long time, others live in Niort, in the Vosges or even in Switzerland. But all suffered the same ordeal: touching, forced nudity, but also penetrations imposed by the one that many considered their friend.
For two weeks, the victims and their parents have come to testify at the bar of the Assize Court in order to deliver their atrocious truth a few meters from the one who crushed them. The one who was their friend, their confidant, their son, their brother, used the same attitude for more than fifteen years. “Muddy the tracks, to better hunt”, analyzes the lawyer of one of the victims. His magic tricks amazed the children, charmed the parents. To approach the children, Sébastien C. liked to interfere in the families to be invited to sleep, to go on vacation with them. “He was like a brother,” said the mother of two victims. When questioned by the Assize Court, the accused recounted “his modus operandi” before evoking “his acting out”, often dictated by “impulses”.
“He has no empathy”
In the box, it is his attitude in the face of the atrocity of the facts that challenged. “He generally recognizes the facts, but he has a somewhat clinical, very detached way of explaining himself. You could tell yourself that he would be crushed by shame. But no. He has no empathy. It gives a feeling of strangeness, something cold. It is chilling, ”says Me Pierre-Yves Launay. The criminal lawyer has been practicing for a little over ten years at the bar of Rennes. And he assures her, he has “never seen someone like that”.
This strange atmosphere is often induced by the camera. But in this trial, the atmosphere is special. Because the victims are very numerous and know little or nothing about each other. There is not this “link of solidarity” which sometimes unites the victims of the same accused. Most of them come to the hearing the day they are summoned, then leave, giving this trial a very secret aspect. “We want to know without knowing too much”, analyzes a lawyer. In this extraordinary case, there is also a terrible spirit of guilt. That of not having seen anything, of not having been able to listen or guess, what the children were going through. Most parents didn’t see anything. The police and justice, however alerted by a complaint in 2014, did nothing when the accused had already been convicted of acts of pedocrime two years earlier.
In 2014, everything could have stopped but…
Between 2014 and until he surrendered in 2017, the magician wreaked havoc, according to a lawyer. The figure of 17 victims in three years has been repeatedly recalled. The doctors and psychologists who followed the children did not detect anything. “All the victims were already showing the same symptoms. Emotional closure, anxiety in front of the toilet, stomach pain, behavioral problems, falling asleep, fear of the dark. And no one in the medical community saw anything”, regrets Pascale, whose little girl was one of the last victims of the magician in 2017. She pleads for “better information for families”, to raise awareness that predators “there are everywhere, in all environments”.
Loved by all, described as “intelligent” Sébastien C. undoubtedly broke the lives of these 27 children and screwed up that of their parents, eaten away by remorse and incomprehension. The psychiatrist who analyzed him put a word on this behavior: “perverse”. “As if he took pleasure in seeing others suffer, without any empathy”, slips a lawyer, before concluding. “I even think that at times he was bored during this trial.”
Already sentenced in 2011, Sébastien C. risks twenty years of criminal imprisonment, the maximum sentence for acts of rape of minors. Placed in pre-trial detention since 2017, he has already served a quarter of this sentence.