Already extremely charged, Tony Meilhon’s criminal record has become even heavier. This Friday evening, the Loire-Atlantique Assize Court sentenced the forty-year-old to 16 years of criminal imprisonment for acts of rape and violence committed against his former partner in December 2010. Tony Meilhon had already been sentenced in 2013, by this same assize court, to life imprisonment, accompanied by a security sentence of 22 years, for the murder and dismemberment of Laëtitia Perrais, 18 years old, in January 2011 in Loire-Atlantique. This sentence was confirmed on appeal two years later.
This Friday evening, the court attached the new conviction to a two-thirds security sentence and a ban on residence in Brittany and Pays-de-la-Loire for ten years at the end of his detention. “You are all liars here,” said Tony Meilhon when the verdict was announced, who said he wanted to appeal.
During his indictment, Attorney General Thierry Rolland denounced “the hell” and the “control mechanism of absolute perversity” experienced for nine months by this former companion of Tony Meilhon, between March and December 2010. We are at the top of the dangerous individual, the perverse psychopath who loves to cause suffering,” said the attorney general.
Tony Meilhon denies rapes
Heard by videoconference, the victim, aged 44, claimed to have been raped by Tony Meilhon on two occasions, on December 24 and 26, 2010. For her lawyer, the absence of the victim at this trial says a lot about the fear that she feels the slightest closeness with the accused, who, with a shaved head and a gray vest, spoke in a calm tone from his box.
“She thought for a long time that this procedure would achieve nothing because the Laetitia affair was much more serious,” underlined Me Marie-Emmanuelle Beloncle. “But today, she wants to be recognized as a victim and not just as Tony Meilhon’s last companion. »
Their nine-month relationship, from March to December 2010, interspersed with several breakups, began with two “idyllic” months, according to the victim’s statements. She then gradually fell into a climate of violence and death threats towards her and those close to her, accentuated by the accused’s use of alcohol and drugs.
During the two days of this trial, if the accused admitted the violence and death threats, while minimizing them, he firmly denied the rapes. The forty-year-old claimed that he was not present at those times and that the victim had “pulled out the atomic weapon”, “the ultimate way to get rid of (him)”.
A “myth in the monstrous sense of the term”
Asked about his relationship with women, the accused replied that he had become violent in a child welfare home, then in prison, where he had spent twelve years before December 2010. “People who grew up in violence will use this means,” he said.
Tony Meilhon’s lawyer, Me Aurélien Ferrand, asked the court to acquit him of the rapes, arguing the absence of material evidence of the presence of the accused at the victim’s home. “Of course there is a ghost in this room (that of Laetitia Perrais) and it is very difficult to ignore it,” conceded the lawyer, recalling the hundreds of reports, books and even a television series dedicated to the murderer of Laetitia Perrais.
For Me Ferrand, Tony Meilhon has become a “myth, not in the glorious sense but in the monstrous sense of the term. It’s the bogeyman of Loire-Atlantique, the one who scares children. He is denied his status as a simple litigant because he committed the atrocity. But there’s no such thing as monsters.”
The murder of Laetitia Perrais 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.