All three men married childminders. A call for witnesses is launched to find potential victims of the last brother.
Three brothers are accused of sexual violence against minors in Doubs. One has already been convicted and another was indicted on Tuesday November 14 and placed under judicial supervision, France Bleu Besançon reported on Friday November 17. Several investigations are open in this case and many children are potentially affected.
The case begins in March 2021 in Saône, near Besançon. According to the Besançon prosecutor, who held a press briefing Friday morning, several middle and high school girls claimed to have been victims of sexual violence at the hands of their childminder when they were children. They accuse their nanny’s husband, a man now aged 76. In June 2023, this man was sentenced to five years in prison for attacks on these children and on his own granddaughter.
The second brother admits to other attacks
As part of these investigations, investigators were asked to interview the nephew of the man in question. He explained that he had suffered sexual violence not from his uncle, but from his father. A second investigation is then opened, this time concerning the brother of the convicted man.
Investigations reveal that sexual violence may have been committed against eight people in this new case. First there are the children of the second brother, the oldest of the siblings, 78 years old, but also young people, again welcomed into the family home. Indeed, his wife is also a childminder. All the facts with which he is accused are now time-barred but he admitted them.
The third brother also implicated
The investigations subsequently allow investigators to collect new testimony. This is the subject of a judicial investigation opened at the beginning of the week at the Besançon investigation center. The testimony implicates the third brother, the youngest of this family of six children, aged 70. He lives in Arguel and he too married a childminder. Its status as a foster family also gives it the right to take in and accommodate children placed by the courts.
One of the young girls, at home from the age of 18 months until she turned 18, explained that she had been the victim of sexual violence committed by this man. The complainant expressed her anger on social networks. The man accused became aware of it and went to the gendarmerie last February to contest the young woman’s statements, believing that they were lies. Finally, he admitted part of the facts. A new investigation was therefore opened.
The woman denounces both acts of sexual touching and rape by digital penetration, when she was thirteen years old. Born in 1982, she became an adult in 2000. The prosecution therefore first sought to determine the facts which were prescribed and those which were not. The offenses are, explains the prosecutor, but not the facts of the crimes denounced by the young girl, justifying the opening of this judicial investigation.
A call for witnesses and victims launched
The third brother was therefore questioned in police custody. He admitted the sexual assaults but denied the act of penetration, therefore the rape. Taking into account the fact that in Arguel then in Larnod, this couple welcomed a very large number of minors (children in care or children taken in as part of the wife’s work as childminder), nephews and nieces , and their own children (four in total), the prosecutor launched a call for witnesses and victims.
This last brother, now indicted, explained during his police custody that he himself was the victim of sexual violence in a reception structure run by priests in Villers-Saint-Martin. According to him, this is what explains his sexual deviance and his attraction to children and adolescents. Concerning the father of the three septuagenarians, he is described as severe but there have been no reports of sexual violence so far. The brothers have always said they were unaware of each other’s actions.