His first escape from this life - documented with rage and unsparing detail in “The End of Eddy,” a coming-of-age roman à clef published when Louis was 21 - was being admitted to a theater program at a school in the nearby, but much larger, city of Amiens. Every day, he said, was a performance, “to protect myself from homophobia and masculine violence.” As the child of a working-class family - his name was Eddy Bellegueule back then - in a northern French town of less than 1,500 people, he would drink beer, talk about soccer or make fun of girls. “It would have been wiser to put an end to this sad legal affair,” she said.Louis doesn’t exactly know why so many directors have wanted to adapt his work, but he has one theory: “There is probably something theatrical in my writing,” he said, “because it’s part of me.”Īfter all, he is gay and every gay person, Louis thinks, is a born actor. Marie Dosé, lawyer for the accused, called the appeal “absurd”. Louis was interviewed by three different police services, by doctors and yet he was criticised because he refused to come to court and recount it all over again for the fifth time,” Pierrat said.
“There is a lot of work to be done in France regarding the trying of rape cases as we have seen in this case. Louis’s lawyer Emmanuel Pierrat said the verdict was absurd and that the appeal meant the case would be “tried again from zero”.
#Edouard louis trial#
Édouard didn’t attend the trial … the truth remains the truth.” Édouard always distanced himself from this trial from which he expected nothing … I can’t help but see this decision as the revenge of an institution against someone who didn’t want to play the game.
It was incontestable.”Īnother friend, the philosopher and sociologist Geoffroy de Lagasnerie wrote online: “It (the judgment) doesn’t state what Édouard says is untrue, it simply states that objective elements or testimonies are never conclusive enough. Would you ask that of a woman? This is an example of the rape culture that exists in France and shows the victims are never believed even if they have all the elements of proof, which Édouard did. “The judge asked me if Édouard was in the habit of meeting boys and taking them back to his home. We are astonished, disgusted and outraged. “The public prosecutor believed the rape and attempted strangulation charges had been established as well as theft, but only the theft was upheld. Clearly the words of a rape victim are not enough to be taken seriously even when backed up by evidence. He was destroyed by this and now with this verdict he is in a very, very bad way.”Įribon added: “It’s no surprise that women who have been raped are reluctant to report it. I suggested he should but he just couldn’t. That was true, but the whole idea of being in the same room as that man was unthinkable for Édouard. “At the trial, the judge said Édouard had changed his story, which he did not, and that he had refused a confrontation with the defendant. He was shaking and crying and in such a state of shock I wanted to take him to hospital,” Eribon told the Guardian. The public prosecutor has now appealed the judgment, as has Louis’s lawyer.ĭidier Eribon, Louis’s former professor at Picardie University and also a bestselling writer, gave evidence at the trial. Last week, a judge cleared him of sexual assault, but sentenced him to three months in prison for two counts of aggravated theft. The accused denied the crimes, insisting there had been no violence and the sex had been consensual. His DNA matched that found on Louis in 2012.Īfter a long inquiry, the public prosecutor demanded the defendant be given a four-year sentence, two suspended, for sexual assault and aggravated theft. The accused was arrested in 2016, after the story came out, as part of a separate police operation. This followed his 2014 autobiographical novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (The End of Eddy), the story of his brutal childhood that launched him on to France’s literary scene. It also noted bruising to Louis’s neck.īellegueule changed his name to Louis and wrote about the alleged attack in his bestselling book Histoire de la violence (History of Violence) in 2016. In 2012, Louis was a 21-year-old student called Eddy Bellegueule and newly arrived in Paris when he told police a man he had met the previous evening had raped and tried to strangle him at knifepoint before stealing his iPad and phone on Christmas Day.Ī medical examination carried out at the time found injuries that the doctor concluded suggested non-consensual and unprotected sex.
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