More than ten years after his sentence to life imprisonment for the murder of Laëtitia Perrais, Tony Meilhon will be back before the Loire-Atlantique Assize Court on Thursday and Friday. This time for rape, violence and death threats against a former partner. The facts of which he is accused date back almost 13 years! More precisely in December 2010, according to the victim, civil party to the trial, a few weeks before the disappearance of Laëtitia Perrais, near Pornic.
Heard as a witness during the trial of Tony Meilhon, in 2013, this concubine told the bar of having received “slaps” and “a kick in the chest” a few months after the start of their relationship, from a man become “possessive, jealous”. The victim claims to have been raped at home on December 24 and 26, 2010, facts for which she filed a complaint shortly after, before Tony Meilhon was implicated in the Laëtitia affair.
Tony Meilhon, 44, refutes the rapes but recognizes “partly the violence”, according to his counsel, Me Aurélien Ferrand. “I hope that the court will stick to this case and that the hearing will not turn into Laëtitia trial number 3,” the defense lawyer told AFP.
An extremely high-profile crime
Tony Meilhon was sentenced in 2015 on appeal to life imprisonment, with a security sentence of 22 years, for the murder and dismemberment of Laëtitia Perrais, 18, in January 2011 in Loire-Atlantique.
This murder was at the forefront of the news for several weeks in 2011, due to the cruelty of the acts committed but also the intervention of Nicolas Sarkozy. The head of state at the time had directly blamed the magistrates for failures in the follow-up of Tony Meilhon after his previous stay in prison, triggering an unprecedented strike by the majority of French courts.
The affair was the subject of a book by Ivan Jablonka, awarded the Medicis Prize in 2016, subsequently adapted into a television series, broadcast in 2020 on France 2.