Sexual crimes against a minor | Thierry Karsenti could spend six years in prison

Found guilty of sexual contact with an 11-year-old boy, former university professor Thierry Karsenti committed his crimes in “the place where a child should feel safest”: in his bed. The Crown is now demanding that the man, a repeat offender, spend six years in custody.

Thierry Karsenti was convicted last July of sexual contact with a minor. He entered the bedroom of an 11-year-old boy around ten times in 2015, caressed his buttocks and slipped his hand into his underwear.

Guilt, sadness, deep inner emptiness, drop in academic performance, abandonment of sports: the consequences have been and still are heavy for the victim. In a letter presented Monday at the Longueuil courthouse, the young man described the suffering he had to endure.

“I tried so hard to convince myself that this was all normal,” writes the man whose identity is protected by a court order.

“I kept asking myself the question: How could someone so close to me do such a thing to me? Today, I still have difficulty trusting people who come into my life, because the feeling of distrust takes up too much space when a person approaches me with kindness,” he testified.

His mother, for her part, described her inability to look at photos of her son when he was 10 or 11 years old.

“The sadness is too strong. Each time I plunge back into this immense pain, imagining what he must have endured in silence,” she said.

While emphasizing “the interminable legal process” which forces her to reopen “this breach”, she “encourages other victims to break the silence, as [son fils] courageously did it.”

Commenting on the ex-professor’s sentence on Monday, Crown prosecutor M^e Anne Gauvin insisted on the duration and repetitive nature of the abuse. Thierry Karsenti, she noted, attacked his victim “in his house, in his room, in his bed”.

The Crown is seeking a prison sentence of six years.

Thierry Karsenti’s lawyer believes that two years less one day of detention would be enough. The man is “proactive in his efforts to obtain help”, observed M^e Clara Daviault.

Next August, Judge Ann-Mary Beauchemin will announce her decision regarding the sentence that Thierry Karsenti will have to serve.

Two other victims

It was not the first time that the man was convicted of a crime of a sexual nature: in 1992, Thierry Karsenti pleaded guilty to five counts. The victims were minors whom he worked with as a table tennis coach.

The man was then sentenced to three years of probation and 180 hours of community service.

“He is on his third victim,” Crown prosecutor M recalled on Monday.^e Anne Gauvin. “He is a repeat offender when it comes to sexual violence,” she insisted.

32 years ago, Thierry Karsenti obtained his pardon, leading to the disappearance of all traces of this conviction in his criminal record.

He was not worried when he landed a position as professor of educational sciences at the University of Montreal.

Also holder of the Canada Research Chair in Information and Communication Technologies, he was frequently cited as an expert in the use of new technologies in schools. He even advised former Minister of Education Sébastien Proulx in 2018.

The pardon that Thierry Karsenti had obtained was revoked a few days after Judge Ann-Marie Beauchemin found him guilty last July. He no longer has an employment relationship with the University of Montreal and now works as a translator, we learned Monday.

Read “How was Thierry Karsenti able to obtain a pardon? »