2023-07-19 20:58:07
Indicted in November 2021 in Paris for rape of a 23-year-old woman, Ary Abittan was placed under the more favorable status of assisted witness on Wednesday.
Actor Ary Abittan, who was indicted in November 2021 in Paris for raping a 23-year-old woman, was finally placed under the more favorable status of witness assisted on Wednesday by two investigating judges, learned the AFP from a source close to the file.
The magistrates responded favorably to his request for granting this status, in accordance with the requisitions of the prosecution, said a judicial source.
According to elements of the order of which AFP was aware, the investigating judges in charge of the investigations recognized the “indisputable” post-traumatic stress of the complainant, but considered that it did not “come out of the judicial investigation of serious or concordant indications in favor of an act of sexual penetration imposed by violence, coercion, threat or surprise”.
Contacted by AFP, the actor’s lawyer, Me Caroline Toby, was “delighted” with “this decision which calls into question the media court which sometimes judges and condemns too quickly”. Me Arash Derambarsh, counsel for the complainant, did not wish to speak “to preserve the secrecy of the investigation”.
The young woman, who had been dating the actor for two months at the time of the charges, accuses him of having imposed sodomy on her while they were spending the evening at his house, on October 30, 2021. She had filed a complaint the same night.
This “precise and detailed” complaint filed “in the hours that followed”, helped to make it “likely” that Mr. Abittan might “commit the acts of rape”, observe the judges.
Medically certified vaginal and anal lesions, messages sent by the complainant to her friends, blood on the bath towel seized from Mr. Abittan’s home had also weighed in the decision to indict him.
But since then, other elements have been “likely to weaken the probative value of the indices initially retained”, consider the judges.
In addition to the testimonies of former girlfriends of Mr. Abittan, who described “a respectful partner”, the magistrates cite psychiatric and psychological expertise which did not “reveal elements of personality in favor of a deviant sexuality or aggressive sexual urges.
In addition, they do not consider it “possible to conclude that the complainant’s traumatic lesions and bleeding” “result from an act of non-consensual sexual penetration”, because the two recounted having had a first consensual sexual intercourse, and that the bleeding “predated, at least in part, the second disputed report”.
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