Firefighters should not face charge of raping girl, French court rules

Accused will face lesser offence of sexual assault in ‘Julie’ case that has sparked protests across France

Kim Willsher in Paris
Thu 18 Mar 2021 12.49 GMT

France’s highest court has ruled that firefighters accused of raping a girl when she was aged between 13 and 15 should be charged with the lesser offence of sexual assault.

A woman known as Julie claims she was raped over a period of two years after being groomed by a firefighter in 2008, when she was a girl aged 13, and that he later introduced her to his colleagues. Three accused men have admitted having sex with her but say it was consensual. Seventeen others have not been charged.

On Wednesday, the cour de cassation, France’s supreme appeal court, rejected an appeal by Julie’s lawyers that the accused should be tried for rape. The judges said it was not proven the men had used “moral constraint”.

The judgment, which Julie’s lawyers attacked as based on “archaic ideology”, came days after the Assemblée Nationale, the lower house of the French parliament, voted unanimously for a new law that set at 15 the age under which no child can be considered to have consented to sexual relations. The legislation was drawn up after a number of sexual abuse and incest scandals involving underage children.

Julie says she was raped by the firefighters between the ages of 13 and 15. Three of them were initially put under official investigation for “rape and sexual assault on a minor of 15 as a group” but a judge later reclassified the charges as “sexual assault without violence, constraint, threat or surprise”.

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French court rules that sex with 13-year-old girl can’t be tried as rape

By Antonia Noori Farzan
March 19, 2021 at 11:15 a.m. EDT

France’s top court has rejected a bid to pursue rape charges against a group of firefighters accused of repeatedly raping a girl known as “Julie” during a period between her 13th and 15th birthdays.

The men will instead be charged with sexual assault, which carries a lighter sentence than rape. Attorneys for Julie’s family plan to contest that decision and bring the case to Europe’s Court of Human Rights.

The horrific allegations in Julie’s case have galvanized protesters who want to see France institute stricter age-of-consent laws. Julie was 13 when she suffered a seizure in school and was rescued by firefighters. After the incident, she began to have severe anxiety attacks that repeatedly required firefighters to intervene, and developed a trusting relationship with the men, which they allegedly later exploited.

According to Julie’s family and lawyers, the firefighters got the teenager’s phone number and began sending her flirtatious messages. Over a two-year period, she was allegedly raped by 20 men. According to her mother, she made multiple suicide attempts and is now struggling with severe disability.

The Wednesday judgment from France’s high court backs a lower appeals court’s finding that Julie, now 25, “had the necessary discernment” to reject the men’s advances, and argues that investigators failed to establish that all of the men were aware that Julie was a minor.

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