Shis complaint, before the explosion of the #MeToo movement, had freed the speech of five other young women. At the trial of a bar manager for rape and sexual assault, the Paris Assize Court heard a first accuser on Monday evening.
It is past 7:00 p.m. when Sonsoles* takes the stand. With a trembling voice, in a sometimes hesitant French, this 32-year-old Spaniard begins to tell the story of the rape she says she suffered and which she denounced five years earlier.
This night from May 27 to 28, 2017, she celebrates the birthday of a friend in the establishment where she works in Paris as a waitress for the accused, Wilfried Nkongo, nicknamed “Fabio”.
“Drunk dead” relates the young woman, she has “black holes” from the evening but also some “memories”.
She “regains consciousness” when she finds herself in the interior courtyard of the establishment, with the “desire to vomit”, remembers that she is “dragged” to an elevator. CCTV footage shows her staggering.
We lay him down on a sofa bed in the bar office.
“I woke up because I heard moans,” she said in a broken voice. Without a look at her ex-employer in the box, who denies the facts, she continues: “He was actually penetrating me”.
She tries to push him away, she mimes at the bar, but falls asleep again. “When I woke up for the second time, my body was lying on my stomach. I heard snoring next to me,” says Sonsoles*.
“I never had any doubt that it was not consented to,” she asserts forcefully at the helm.
A medical examination will reveal lesions consistent with recent traumatic penetration.
“Predator”
His complaint, filed a few hours after the facts denounced, will trigger several others.
“There was undeniably an effect of freeing speech”, notes an interviewer interviewed in the afternoon.
Five other young women, also civil parties to the trial, will successively file a complaint, denouncing acts of rape or sexual assault between February 2016 and the summer of 2018, all formally contested by the accused, 41 years old.
In his first statement to the court, at 10:15 p.m., Wilfried Nkongo evokes a “consensual relationship” with one of the women accusing him of rape.
The facts date back to July 2018, more than a year after the first complaint, while he was under judicial supervision in his house in Var.
He had a time said to have “wrong room” and thought that the young woman was his companion. “I said that to try to save my couple”, assures the accused, shaved head, surgical mask on his face.
He is due to face his other accusers on Tuesday and Wednesday.
All “inserted”, they are young women with “the head on the shoulders, who did not vary on their declarations”, insisted the investigator.
He also recalled this “context where certain behaviors were allowed”, trivialized.
Several former employees of the night establishments managed by the accused described the “very insistent behavior” of their former boss and facts that could constitute sexual assault. Without them having been denounced.
“Misplaced hands, slightly stolen kisses”, reports a former server heard by videoconference. “He had an interest in girls, offered them free shots, ecstasy. (…) Some would say seductive, others predatory,” he says.
“We all closed our eyes,” adds the ex-server. “It itched us but it’s before #MeToo. It was not yet recognized as inadmissible in society,” he says.
In the evening, a former employee declared in court that she had been sexually assaulted by “Fabio”, seven years earlier.
She says he took her to the bar’s storage room, forcefully kissed her, and she struggled. His colleagues speak to him in a joking tone of “Fabio’s hazing”.
She had been heard as part of the procedure, without revealing these facts.
“I watered down a lot of things because I didn’t want to be considered a victim,” explains the young woman at the helm. “I regret not having mentioned it sooner”.
Verdict expected on Friday.
* The first name has been changed
21/03/2022 23:30:58 – Paris (AFP) – © 2022 AFP