It is a new ordeal for the victims of Florian Varin, who still have to face their rapist in court, in this case the Assize Court of Tarn-et-Garonne in Montauban, since Monday, October 18 and until Friday.
The man, now 30, has yet already been condemned twice. The first time in Toulouse, in June 2015. The second on appeal in 2018, before the assizes of Tarn. Each time, the court found Florian Varin guilty and sentenced him to 30 years of imprisonment.
But this last conviction was quashed by the Court of Cassation, which recognized a technical flaw, in September 2019.
New trial and a return to zero for the victims
It is therefore necessary to start again from zero or almost since this Monday morning, in Montauban. Recall the facts and these horrible moments lived by the victims that the serial rapist attacked in Rennes, La Rochelle, Niort, and Toulouse.
Florian Varin was arrested in November 2012 in Toulouse, after a rape and an attempted murder on a 25-year-old young woman. He had tried to strangle her before leave her for dead in a garbage container.
Three victims came to testify on Monday, October 18 before the Assize Court of Tarn-et-Garonne. The first was 17, the day Florian Varin raped her in April 2012. He contacted her on a dating site and came to pick her up. She clearly expresses her refusal, in writing and orally, to undertake anything with him during this first meeting. Claiming to want to smoke joints with her, he convinces her to get in his car and takes her to an isolated place where he rapes her.
In total, Florian Varin admitted six rapes. On several occasions, as in the case of this young woman, he records these crimes with his cell phone. The investigators transcribed the soundtracks, used at the hearing. A young woman said to Florian Varin: “what you are doing to me is rape because I have no choice”.
She lodged a complaint but the file was closed without follow-up. Despite a first custody, Florian Varin will start again, at least five times.
An accused who would have “changed” after 9 years in prison
According to a lawyer, the thirty-something would have expressed regret and apologized in the morning at the opening of the hearing. He said to himself “in all might“at the age of 20, at the time of the facts. Now at the age of 30, his perception of the facts would have changed: “I thought it was a sex game, that it was okay. As long as you don’t hear it, until you see it, you can’t understand what the person has gone through. Today is horrible “ said Florian Varin.
I know that it has changed (…) and I am reassured because an expert will come to tell us on Thursday the evolution he noted – Me Alexandre Martin, one of Florian Varin’s lawyers
But its victims must recount the horror suffered and the dramatic consequences on their lives: no longer being able to go out, if only to do shopping, abandoned studies, a child project still delayed with the prospect of this third trial. . Faced with their testimonies, he answers the same thing: “at the time, I didn’t know I was doing wrong.” Or : “It was a sex game for me, I was looking to satisfy my needs”.
“Know that outside, we do not rebuild ourselves any more than you in prison”
This is also his defense, after Wendy’s story: “I was a monster”. Wendy was 15 and was spending an evening in La Rochelle with her mother and two other people. They can no longer find their car and wander in search of it. Florian Varin runs into Wendy and her friend and offers to help them, pretending to be a member of a “association which helps young people to take them home”.
Reassured, Wendy climbs into her car but he also takes her there to a sordid place, very far from downtown. But wendy goes “avoid the worst”, by talking to him constantly to make his aggressor aware of what he is making him experience. She manages to escape.
So when three trials later, she hears the exact same words from the accused in the box, she asks to come back to the bar. She strikes in front of Florian Varin: “I am still waiting for your apologies. I would like this to end. Know that outside, we do not rebuild any more than you, in prison”.
Wendy then returned to sit next to the other victims, who had been very close to them for nine years. At the assizes of Tarn-et-Garonne, they occupy the same bench on the civil parties, almost glued to each other. “We are like sisters in our misfortune, we found ourselves together and happily. We help each other all the time. Without them, I wouldn’t be there and I think that without each other, we would not have gone so far. ‘at the end”, explains Wendy.
Florian Varin’s lawyer hopes that the jurors and the court “will be able to place the cursor on the sentence”, Come in “a completely lost 20-year-old and a 30-year-old man who is not yet at the end of the road, but whose evolution is evident”. The verdict is expected Friday in Montauban.
–
