From that night, Edouard Louis had taken the work history of violence. The Paris Court of Appeal confirmed, Monday, February 7, the release of a 36-year-old man, who was accused by the novelist of having sexually assaulted him in December 2012. Riadh B., also nicknamed Reda, s’ is also seen confirming his three-month suspended prison sentence for the thefts of a tablet and a mobile phone.
In November 22, during his appeal trial, this 36-year-old Algerian contested any violence against the writer, now 29 years old, who was absent from the hearing. The public prosecutor’s office had requested a four-year prison sentence, including two years, the same as that required at first instance.
On the evening of December 25, 2012, Edouard Louis, who was then called Eddy Bellegueule and was not yet a famous author, had filed a complaint for rape at gunpoint and aggravated robbery. To the police, he had reported having met in the street a man named Reda who had accompanied him to his home. He explained that he had consensual sex, before realizing that his tablet and his phone had disappeared. Confronted, Reda was, according to the plaintiff’s statements, become threatening, had strangled him with a scarf and then raped him.
“It’s a huge victory, that of the law over ten years of pressure and extra-judicial manipulation”, welcomed the lawyer of Riadh B., Marie Dosé. “Riadh B. is innocent and has been claiming it for ten years. His presumption of innocence has been flouted and violated for a whole decade.”.
On Facebook, the novelist lamented the release: “Did I lose today? I don’t know, I had nothing to gain, you can never win from going through experiences like these, you can only lose or lose. “ According to him, “Making a complaint, in our configuration, is not necessarily the right solution, especially in this type of violence”.
At the end of the investigation, as in many cases of rape charges, the facts had been reclassified as “sexual assault”, bringing the case to court and not to the assizes.