At the Assize Court of Nanterre,
Suddenly, the Nanterre criminal court freezes. “Outside, there’s no one waiting for you, what do you have to hide?” Don’t try to protect your children, we are grown up. » For the first time since the opening of her trial on November 28, Monique Olivier appears destabilized. The man who calls out to her so strongly is none other than Selim, the son she had with Michel Fourniret. “I am not your son, you are not my mother,” he loses his temper when he hears his mother repeat, again and again, that she no longer remembers where the bodies of the victims are hidden.
Until then all the testimony, whether touching or accusatory, had seemed to slide on the accused. Not this time. Monique Olivier raises her voice. “You’re not going to lecture me!” I’ve said everything there is to say! “, she replies dryly. Before adding, in a provocative tone: “You really look like your father dressed up like that.” It must be admitted that she is not wrong. Selim Olivier obtained from the court the right to testify by videoconference. To avoid being recognized, he appears wrapped up in a thick blue down jacket, wearing a grotesque gray wig, big glasses on his nose and a fake mustache that seems straight out of a joke store.
Despite these artifices, the resemblance is striking. He has the same long, thin nose as his father, the same high forehead, the same eyes, above all. A few seconds after raising her voice, Monique Olivier composes herself. “Learning who his parents are… I would have had the same reaction,” she specifies, assuring that she loves him. “Even if he doesn’t love me anymore. »
“We were close… Well, I thought so”
For more than two hours now, Selim Olivier has been recounting this cursed life as the son of an evil couple. His childhood, however, he describes as banal. In any case, far from what we can imagine when we know that even before his birth, he was used by the couple to give their victims confidence, to push them to lower their guard and climb into the van. He remembers his father, Michel Fourniret, as an “authoritarian” and “not loving” man. If he never raised a hand against him, he describes him as “aggressive”. “We stopped laughing because Michel arrived,” he summarizes. With his mother – whom he calls Monique since he “learned the truth” – the relationship is completely different. She is his “mom”, “the woman who took care of me, who helped me”. And to insist: “We were close… Well, I thought so. »
When his father was arrested in June 2003, after trying to kidnap a teenage girl, he enjoyed this life alone with his mother. Is he not surprised by the countless auditions to which Monique Olivier is summoned? There will be more than 120 in one year. Or one every three days, notes the president, Didier Safar. Selim doesn’t really ask the question. He thinks of a robbery because he once saw wads of banknotes. Until that day in June 2004. “She left for an audition and she didn’t come back. I stayed at home alone for two days,” he says. Monique Olivier has just confessed, admitting to two murders, then soon nine. “I saw her as a mother, not as an accomplice of Michel Fourniret,” he insists.
“It would have marked me”
Her presence this Wednesday is not only intended to shed light on the personality of the accused. A former fellow inmate of Monique Olivier assured that she had received secrets from the latter on the kidnapping of Estelle Mouzin. She would have confided to him that the little girl had been kidnapped at their home, in Belgium, and that Selim, then aged 14, would have come face to face with the victim. Monique Olivier admitted to having participated in the kidnapping of the child but always assured that she had been kept in the Ardennes, in the house of Michel Fourniret’s deceased sister. “It would have struck me to see a little girl at home who had nothing to do there,” assures Selim. The president insists. Does he not remember a little girl who was introduced to him as his cousin? If he admits to having “erased” memories of this period, he is categorical. “I have no knowledge of a so-called cousin who came one evening. Plus, so young, without his parents. »
Selim Olivier does not seek to defend his mother, to find any excuse for her. After Monique Olivier’s arrest, he was taken in by her eldest sons. He cut ties after two years of correspondence and only saw her once in twenty years, last year, for a confrontation with the investigating judge. To hear him this Wednesday, his anger is equal to his disappointment. “I was horrified to see that it was not a victim. She knew what was happening, she knew what he was going to do. » He depicts a “manipulative” woman, shattering the image of the submissive wife. He recalls that when Michel Fourniret was arrested in 2003, the first thing she did was to move to be closer to the prison where he was detained. “I lived with actors for 15 years. Actor dad, actor mom… They hid their true nature from me, what they really did. I did not suspect the people they really were,” he insists.
Monique Olivier must be heard on the merits of the Mouzin case on Thursday.