#SciencesPorcs: a look back at Toulouse’s runaway
“I was crying in your arms and you forced me. You raped me (…). I was sleeping and you continued, you raped me ”: Juliette’s testimony, facing the camera, in a turtleneck, very short hair, is an uppercut at the beginning of February 2021. The hashtag #SciencesPorcs appears in the wake, launched by the feminist Anna Toumazoff, herself a former student at Sciences Po Toulouse. The denunciation of the “culture of rape” in the institutes of political studies invades social networks.
Ten months later, the student implicated by Juliette (“Quentin” for the media) has just had his indictment canceled. His defense does not doubt the dismissal which should soon close a case where the young man is now “assisted witness”. Removed from campus and forced to follow his teachings remotely by the management, the young man also hopes that these disciplinary measures will soon lapse. Without prejudging the judicial epilogue, the case is very revealing of the slippages that the breaking wave #MeToo and its derivatives can cause.
To understand its mechanisms, we must return to the chronology of the facts. In the fall of 2020, the rumor spread that Juliette recounts having been humiliated during the integration days in the first year, in 2018, and raped. She was just over 18 at the time, less than two years separate the two students. The whole campus is quickly informed. The young woman also opens up to the director of the school who seizes the floor. “He told me we were doing pretty much what I wanted,” she said later. But nothing really moves because, in justice, Juliette does not give the name of her supposed attacker.
Language precautions. February 2021, a month after the Olivier Duhamela scandal erupted and spattered Sciences Po Paris, everything is accelerating in Toulouse. This time Juliette posted her accusing video, responded to interviews. She is known to activists of feminist networks, in particular for having, a year earlier, in the middle of a conference in Toulouse, arrested the economist Thomas Piketty, accused of domestic violence by his ex-partner Aurélie Filippetti. She is also close to the activist Anna Toumazoff works with her and to collect testimonies and to pronounce “the Sciences Po schools (which) made rapists, silence the victims”, assures Anna Toumazoff on France 3. Juliette carries therefore complaint.
After the denunciation, Quentin is arrested, placed in police custody and indicted for rape. He escapes the provisional detention that the prosecution claims but that the judges of the seat refuse. To the investigators, he confirms the sexual relations but refutes any unauthorized report. His lawyers, Mes Julien Aubry and Séverine Bouchaib, produce multiple exchanges between the two students, which, according to them, generated the absence of rape. Elements reinforced by the testimony of a friend of Juliette who would never have heard of such violence. Psychic experts also dismiss the idea of constraint or control. An important investigative work on the lifting of the judicial control of Julien this summer then, last week, on his change of status, from indictment to assisted witness.
Meanwhile, Quentin’s life is a mess. His friends turn their backs on him, his roommates ask him to leave the place, the rumor reaches the village of his parents, traders in the Toulouse region. He who took part in the same demonstrations as Juliette “of the left, sensitive to the cause of women”, his lawyers – obviously grumbles. At Sciences Po Toulouse, in February, the runaway was total. The director, Olivier Brossard (he has since changed), and his assistant Christine Mennesson, sociologist and specialist in “gender norms”, held a press conference. “The facts (…) occurred …”, affirmed the person in charge, without much precautions of language. By “precautionary measure” and without having been heard by the school, Quentin, now in fifth year, is ordered to study at a distance. Juliette is, in year, in internship abroad – since, the disciplinary procedure has been disoriented and entrusted to the University of Bordeaux.
Militant background. At the same time, the Minister of Higher Education, Frédérique Vidal, advises on France inter that “we are witnessing the liberation of speech and that it is always good”, congratulating the “pioneers (…), those who dare to speak ”. A general inspection of the institutes of political studies is set off with beating drums. The point is not to distribute good or bad points. The management of accusations of rape is delicate, all the more so when a community of students is concerned and the response must intervene all cases ceasing, under the spotlight of the media and social networks. But a minimum of caution does not hurt.
The militant context around Sciences Po Toulouse is obvious. Juliette’s lawyer, Me Sara Khoury-Cardoso (“unavailable” to respond to our requests), presents herself on her site as “lesbian and social mother, involved in the defense of LGBTI people”. On February 15, 2021, she tweets that “Juliette’s life was shattered by the acts of rape of which she was a victim” and denounces “a presumption of a lie on the part of the victim”. For their part, the Toulouse public prosecutor’s office (which did not respond to our requests, knowing that a new prosecutor arrived this summer) and Sciences Po seemed to leave ball in head, first anxious to respond to media pressure . Without speaking of instrumentalization, Quentin’s entourage wonders about the role of those close to Juliette and their desire to publicize the case.
“In this surge, we noted the desire to set an example, to designate a ‘culprit’ and a lot of partiality. My client was thrown away. Fortunately, he is strong in his head ”, assures Me Julien Aubry. “This excitement has nailed him to the pillory. Suddenly, a 20-year-old kid has embodied “the sexual aggressor of higher education”, “adds his colleague Séverine Bouchaib. The two open lawyers but their “cleared” client do not plan to initiate proceedings for slanderous denunciation. “In this case, there was a lot of suffering, on all sides,” concludes an official from Sciences Po Toulouse.
window.fbAsyncInit = function() { FB.init({
appId : '445890365491209',
xfbml : true, version : 'v2.9' }); };
(function(d, s, id){ var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;} js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));