This expertise is a pivot point in the investigation for rapes targeting Tariq Ramadan. This Thursday, the examining magistrates ordered Thursday a college of experts to carry out a new expertise on the possible influence suffered by his accusers of the theologian, we learned from sources close to the file.
This decision comes a week after the cancellation by the Paris Court of Appeal of a first report conducted by the famous psychiatrist Daniel Zagury. The latter had questioned four complainants without the agreement of the investigating judges, leading to a procedural violation. Drawing the consequences of this decision, they again appealed to Dr. Daniel Zagury, as well as his colleagues Bernard Ballivet and Frédéric Meunier, to reconsider the question, according to these sources.
Was the constraint “moral”?
The report must be delivered by November 30 and the judges this time formalized the authorization to hear four of the accusers: the first plaintiff Henda Ayari, a woman nicknamed “Christelle”, Mounia Rabbouj and a fourth woman. The legal debate on this notion of influence was imposed after the plaintiffs were sometimes put in difficulty by the revelation of their exchanges with Tariq Ramadan, considered “ambivalent” by the investigators.
The question has become essential for the investigating judges who must determine, before ordering a possible trial or the abandonment of the proceedings, whether or not the Islamologist can be accused of having imposed acts of sexual penetration by some form. of “moral constraint”. In defense of the 58-year-old Muslim intellectual, who pleads for domineering relationships, this “notion of hold” is invoked as “a lifeline to save the investigation from legal shipwreck”.
A meeting “described as a sudden and brutal sequence”
In his canceled report, Dr Daniel Zagury, without settling the question of the free consent of these women, described in four stages the relationship established by Tariq Ramadan: a “veneration” for “the brilliant intellectual” encountered on social networks , then exchanges “more and more eroticized with a sadomasochistic coloring of domination / submission”, followed by a meeting “described as a sudden and brutal sequence” towards extreme sexual practices, before a fourth phase of contradictory feelings ( lingering resentment, guilt, revenge, admiration and subjugation).
Since the first complaint at the end of October 2017, Tariq Ramadan has been indicted in Paris for suspicion of rape committed on five women. He is the target of an investigation in Geneva for a rape denounced by a Swiss woman.