Closing arguments in the Farel case

The closing arguments in the Farel case stage three sharply different claims on the jurors’ attention: Maître Ferré’s account of Mila Wizman’s lasting suffering, the prosecutor’s effort to recognize that suffering while recommending a non-custodial sentence, and Maître Célérier’s defense of Alexandre Farel through the presumption of doubt. Rather than resolving the competing versions of the night, the sequence makes the courtroom’s central tension explicit: acknowledging harm and determining criminal guilt are related, but not identical, judgments.

The civil party’s account of Mila’s suffering

After the proceedings close, the presiding judge allows the closing speeches to begin. Maître Ferré, counsel for Mila, speaks first after a short recess to confer with her client. She frames her role not as proving Alexandre’s guilt but as making the jurors hear what Mila has lived through since the night of January 11, 2016. Her argument shifts attention from the defendant’s character to the consequences of the assault and the difficulty Mila has faced in recounting it.

Addressing Mila directly, Maître Ferré recalls that her client had been unable to speak at their earlier meetings and had cried instead. The trial, she argues, forced Mila to narrate painful events again and again, while questions about her personal and sexual life compounded the strain. The account also traces the aftermath in concrete terms: nightmares, avoidance, difficulty leaving home, shame, and hostility toward her own body. Maître Ferré connects Mila’s choice of loose black clothing and her later claim to men she met that she had uterine cancer to her efforts to keep men at a distance and protect herself.

The argument counters the defense’s portrayal of a misunderstanding by insisting that Mila did not want the sexual encounter and that fear and shock limited her ability to resist. Maître Ferré rejects Alexandre’s claim that Mila experienced pleasure, presenting it as another injury added during the trial. She places the case in the context of women speaking publicly about sexual violence after the Weinstein revelations and the spread of #MeToo and #BalanceTonPorc. Her closing appeal is for the jurors to locate shame with the aggressor, not the complainant, and to recognize that a brief assault can have consequences extending far beyond the time it lasted.

The prosecutor’s divided position

The prosecutor follows Maître Ferré, recalling Mila’s shame, fear of disbelief, police interviews, medical examinations, and appearance before an unfamiliar jury. The prosecutor emphasizes that the existence of sexual intercourse on the night between January 11 and 12, 2016, is not disputed; the contested issue is the circumstances and meaning of the encounter. Alexandre is presented as a person with contrasting aspects: a diligent, vulnerable student, but also someone capable of contemptuous, possessive, and violent behavior. The prosecutor describes the offense as opportunistic, arguing that the opportunity arose and Alexandre acted.

At the same time, the prosecutor addresses the jurors’ assessment of Alexandre and his future. He calls him sincere and says his life has been overturned, with prison a source of fear. He asks the court to consider reintegration as well as Mila’s suffering, while maintaining that the evidence points to an isolated act and that the psychiatric experts found no continuing danger or risk of reoffending. The position is therefore not a request for acquittal: the prosecutor calls Alexandre guilty, but argues that punishment should reflect his history and circumstances.

The requested sentence is five years’ imprisonment, all suspended—the maximum suspended term. The prosecutor stresses that this is not leniency without consequence: any offense committed within five years could revoke the suspension and send Alexandre to prison. Mila turns toward her lawyers in fear and confusion, unable to understand why the prosecutor, despite acknowledging her suffering, appears to have moved toward the other side. During the recess, Adam Wizman and Mila’s supporters share her dismay; Maître Rozenberg believes the case has already been lost.

The defense’s demand for legal doubt

Maître Célérier speaks last. In the packed courtroom, the defense lawyer argues that anyone can find themselves on the wrong side of a life-altering decision, and says his questioning of Mila should not be mistaken for denial of her suffering. He asks the jurors to distinguish the complainant’s interpretation of the encounter from Alexandre’s and to judge the legal charge rather than dislike of the defendant. Alexandre, he notes, has consistently denied rape.

The defense acknowledges traits that may repel the jury: Alexandre’s privileged background, apparent arrogance, crude sexual language, narcissism, and concern with athletic performance and social-media images. But Célérier argues that these characteristics do not establish rape. He invokes Article 222-23 of the French Penal Code, presenting the legal issue as whether penetration occurred through violence, surprise, threat, or coercion. He argues that the prosecution has not established a threat with a knife, and that an unusual location or sexually explicit language cannot by themselves prove coercion. He also repeats the distinction that an acquittal would not establish that Mila consented: in his formulation, the court may find insufficient proof of criminal intent or conclude that Alexandre misread her resistance.

Célérier returns to the unresolved gap between the accounts. The evidence, he says, leaves zones of uncertainty, and the court must reach a judicial truth without treating the reality of Mila’s suffering as proof of every element of the charge. He criticizes the prosecution for bringing questions of class, shame, Weinstein, and #MeToo into the courtroom, arguing that jurors must decide the acts alleged rather than respond to public pressure. His appeal invokes the consequences of imprisonment and the presumption of innocence: doubt, he insists, must benefit Alexandre, not be overcome by demands for a symbolic verdict.

The unresolved stakes of the speeches

The three speeches do not offer a common account of what the encounter meant. Maître Ferré centers the damage Mila describes and the social conditions that can keep victims silent. The prosecutor accepts that Alexandre committed rape while also arguing for a sentence that allows for his future reintegration. The defense separates sympathy from proof and urges the jurors not to treat public anger or the defendant’s distasteful behavior as substitutes for evidence of coercion.

The sequence ends with the defense’s appeal for acquittal, not with a verdict. Its significance lies in showing how one case is argued through different kinds of truth: Mila’s account of fear and its aftermath, the prosecutor’s judgment about guilt and punishment, and the defense’s demand that criminal conviction meet a legal standard. The speeches make the jurors’ decision consequential for both parties while leaving the conflict between acknowledgment of harm and proof under law unresolved at this point in the narrative.