It is a particularly sordid trial which opens this Monday before the Gironde assizes and at least partial closed session could be requested by the civil party. Three former rugby players FC Grenoblethen aged 23 to 27, were sent back there for gang rape after the complaint of a student, aged 21 at the time of the facts, which date back to the night of March 11 to 12, 2017. Two other players will also be judged on this occasion, for failure to assist a person in danger since they were spectators of at least part of the scenes, without putting an end to them.
The debates will continue until June 28 to try to clarify what happened that night, after the FCG’s defeat against UBB (Union Bordeaux Bègles) and what roles the five young internationals played there. rugby. Unbridled evening between consenting adults or abuse of a young woman rendered dazed by alcohol? The versions will clash in the audience.
What are the facts ?
This March 11, the complainant and two friends who accompanied her met FCG players in a pub in the city center. They drink a lot and the evening continues late at a disco on the quays. The 21-year-old then took a taxi, around 4 a.m., with rugby player Denis Coulson, one of the three accused, to go to a hotel in Mérignac where the team was staying.
After fellatio performed in the taxi, the player has sexual relations for the first time with her in the bathroom of his room, which he shares with another player. Subsequently, two other players have a relationship with her and one of them admits to using a banana, a bottle and crutches during sexual acts. DNA traces of the young woman were found on the crutches, which belonged to Christopher Farrell, another member of the FCG, injured during the match. He is being prosecuted for failure to assist a person in danger.
After the young woman’s complaint, filed on March 12, three rugby players, Denis Coulson, Loïck Jammes and Rory Grice, are being prosecuted for having “by violence, coercion, threat or surprise, committed acts of sexual penetration, in species fellatio and penio-vaginal penetrations or with objects on the person of the civil party with the circumstance that the facts were committed in a meeting”, according to the elements communicated by the general prosecutor’s office of the Bordeaux Court of Appeal.
During the investigation, the young woman explained that she “had no memory between the moment when she drank vodka and danced in the disco, and the moment when she regained consciousness, lying naked on a bed, surrounded by several men had the impression of being penetrated by a metallic object,” reports the general prosecutor’s office.
What do the videos at the heart of the investigation tell us?
The three accused admit to having had sexual relations with the complainant but for them, it was consensual. The victim would even have been very enterprising towards them. And to provide proof, Denis Coulson will provide a video shot to immortalize his antics, between him and Loïck Jammes, who joins him in his room.
Problem: the two edges do not interpret the images in the same way at all. “She makes noises, moans, she participates in the gestures of this young girl,” said Corinne Dreyfus Schmidt, Denis Coulson’s lawyer. The psychiatrist said she was on autopilot so yes maybe but for them, from the moment she participated, she was consenting. » Loïck Jammes, who is the one who uses several objects during the act, assures that she was “happy and made sexual noises”.
“On the video we do not see a consenting person,” retorts Anne Cadiot-Feidt, the victim’s lawyer. She wakes up with naked men around her and she doesn’t know where she is. » Hotel guests confirmed the young woman’s distress when she left the room, around 7 a.m. They hear her crying and she collapses in front of the receptionist, who calls a taxi. To the driver, she also confided, in panic, that she had been raped and immediately called her mother and her friends. She then speaks of an attack which involved five men, one of whom was on crutches.
Another video was shot by the hotel’s CCTV and shows the arrival of the young woman by taxi. We see that she has great difficulty moving and that on two occasions she tries to get back into the taxi but is prevented from doing so by Denis Coulson, who even tries to carry her at one point. The night watchman confirms that she seems “sleepy and groggy” when she gets out of the taxi.
The referral to the court is based on “the testimonies collected and the analysis of the hotel videos [qui] demonstrated without any ambiguity that, given his extremely advanced state of intoxication, the civil party was not in a position to consent to a sexual act. »
How to explain the victim’s amnesia?
The young woman describes a complete blackout after her alcohol consumption, between the moment she leaves the nightclub and the moment she is awakened by pain on this bed, surrounded by men. Her alcohol level was estimated between 2.3 and 3 grams per liter of blood, even though she weighs around sixty kilos. Although they also drank a lot, the three players weigh around 100 kg each.
When she is confronted with the scene filmed in the hotel room by Denis Coulson, she is horrified and has no memories. She assured investigators that she had never before had this type of relationship, involving several partners.
The expert psychiatrist Roland Coutanceau evokes in this file a “clinical lacunar amnesia allowing the subject to retain the capacity for an action but in response to stimulation… with a reflex or mechanical logic”. In short, dazed, she is too drunk to say no to the young men’s injunctions.
For the civil party, his client was reduced to the status of an object and it was not possible not to realize this. They do not stagger and are more accustomed to drinking, she argues. “They are predators, there is no dimension of seduction in their behavior,” analyzes Master Cadiot-Feidt. In this case, we exploit and defile the body of another human being. » After the incident, she recalls that they had launched a WhatsApp group to tune their violins.
And when she comes to her senses, the young woman leaves the hotel in a hurry. During the investigations, the state of shock described by the witnesses seemed “incompatible with the version of the accused”. If the three young men say they are surprised by this departure, Loïck Jammes admits during the procedure to having “a little lack of respect for the young woman”, specifying that he was not aware of her level of alcoholism , and Denis Coulson concedes that “everything that happened in the bedroom was wrong. »
Coming back to these atrocious facts will be very complicated for the young woman, who is 28 years old today. Her counsel describes her as “crushed from the inside” by this affair but she also expects a lot from the trial, which is being held seven years after the events.