Trial of ‘Rape 36’: For the accused, a day of compliments and little hiccups

Good husband, good cop, good father: Nicolas R. and Antoine Q., on trial for assaulting a Canadian tourist in 2014, were the subject of a flattering portrait on Friday. Decorated with some slides.

It’s been an almost peaceful day for them after detailing the sordid allegations against them, or analysing the tiniest stain on their underwear by DNA experts in court. It won’t hurt jurors at least one day when they retire to deliver a verdict in two weeks. At a hearing on Friday, Jan. 18, Nicolas R. and Antoine Q., no longer charged as drunk tourist rapists, dropped this “horror costume that we [they] have been wearing for five years,” wearing Dressed as a lover, a good father, and a goofy cop.

On the fifth day of a trial on an astonishing timetable – with defendants still not being heard on the facts – the Paris circuit court is considering the investigation and the personalities of two former agents of the brigade. A 39-year-old Canadian has accused her of raping her inside the judicial police station at 36 quai des Orfèvres after a drunken night five years ago.

Testimonies from relatives, colleagues and psychiatrists – who found no “pathological features of any mental or sexual dimension” in them – paint the portraits and journeys of two men with no story, or almost, until “evening 2014” April 22-23, 2018. And restore their image, somewhat tainted by the crimes they deny, which cost them their careers at the BRI and face 20 years in prison for it.

Antoine Q. is “a very heroic man, very graceful in his way of being. He has respected women since he was a child. That’s how his peers describe him to character investigators, anyway. “She’s a super brave woman, Proof, we’re still together, and she’s supporting me to the death,” the 40-year-old defendant whispered, moved, in the words of a friend “not a penny of manliness”. The couple was formed 19 years ago, born in 2012 and got a boy. Antoine Q. is a “hen daddy, 100% dedicated to his family,” she promises.

“This job is my life”
Good father, good policeman. In the “Holy Grail of Police” Belt and Road Initiative, which he joined in 2010, he followed in the footsteps of his father and brother, both of whom passed the famous unit where the accused was charged with intervening. Environment – nuclear, bacterial, chemical. His line manager emphasized his “perfect investment”, with one colleague describing him as “hard-working, willing and thoughtful”. Antoine Q. herself recalls the compliments of a superior when she started work in the 16th arrondissement of Paris: “He told me that I had a rare sense of police. This profession is me, it is my life.»

Good husband, good cop, good father: Nicolas R. and Antoine Q., on trial for assaulting a Canadian tourist in 2014, were the subject of a flattering portrait on Friday. Decorated with some slides.