Maître Juliette Ferré

Maître Juliette Ferré is the lawyer representing Mila Wizman as a civil party in the Farel rape trial. Her central intervention is to make the court hear what the proceedings can do to a complainant as well as determine what happened: she presents Mila’s suffering, the pressure of repeated testimony, and the need for recognition as matters the jurors must confront. Ferré’s address does not treat advocacy as a substitute for the verdict. Instead, it insists that the human consequences of the case remain visible while the court considers responsibility and punishment.

Role in the Trial

When the debates close, the presiding judge announces that the closing addresses may begin. After a brief suspension so the civil-party lawyers can speak with their client, Ferré takes the stand with her notes. Her manner is calm and empathetic. She explains that Mila has come before the assize court because she needs to be heard, and that recognition of her suffering—especially its recognition through a legal sanction—may help her rebuild her life.

Ferré carefully defines the limits of her role. She tells the court that she is not there to demonstrate Alexandre Farel’s guilt, but to restore Mila’s suffering to the record and describe her life since January 11, 2016. She first turns from the jurors to Mila herself, making the complainant, rather than the accused or the lawyers, the immediate audience of part of her address. That gesture gives the speech a double direction: it asks the court to listen and offers Mila direct acknowledgment in a room where she has had to endure scrutiny.

Giving Mila’s Experience a Narrative

Ferré recalls that Mila had been unable to speak freely in their earlier meetings, crying instead, and cites Mila’s question about what she had done to deserve what happened. The lawyer places the assault beside the contempt Mila experienced afterward, emphasizing that the legal process required her to tell and retell a painful account even though she wanted to forget it. In Ferré’s formulation, recounting sexual violence can make the experience present again; testimony is therefore not a neutral repetition but an ordeal with its own cost.

She also challenges the way the defense’s questioning has exposed Mila’s private life, particularly her sexual history, to examination. Ferré describes the questions as intrusive and excessive, and rejects the insinuation that Mila’s account is unreliable because of who she was or what relationships she had had. The point is not merely that the questioning was unpleasant: in Ferré’s argument, the trial risks adding suspicion and humiliation to the original harm. She asks the jurors to understand that a person who maintains her account through police questioning and two years of proceedings should not be casually reduced to a liar.

Reconstructing the Circumstances

Ferré situates Mila’s vulnerability within the life she had led before meeting Alexandre. She describes a young woman from Toulouse whose family had faced a terrorist attack and a difficult separation, who was retaking her baccalaureate and trying to prove to people close to her that she could succeed. Mila, Ferré argues, feared judgment and evaluation and felt especially vulnerable in social settings above her own social milieu. This background is presented not as a reason to doubt her, but as context for why Alexandre’s company could initially reassure her.

In Ferré’s account of the evening of January 11, 2016, Mila found herself alone in an unfamiliar Paris apartment among people she did not know. Alexandre spent time with her, and his presence made her feel less isolated. Ferré argues that Mila could see his charm without recognizing manipulation or predatory intent. She says he had urged her to drink despite her inexperience; when he suggested going outside, Mila accepted in search of company and security. The location they reached was a garbage-room area, not somewhere she had chosen as the destination of her evening. Ferré stresses that Mila had not wanted to drink or smoke, had not wanted to end up there, and had not wanted sexual intercourse. The distinction between accepting company and consenting to sex is fundamental to her account of the case.

Harm, Recognition, and the Court’s Task

Ferré describes the aftermath as extending beyond the assault itself. She says Mila blamed herself, felt ashamed and dirty, hated her body, and treated it harshly. She connects Mila’s subsequent tendency to wear loose black clothing and to tell men she had uterine cancer with attempts to conceal her body and keep men at a distance. These details give the consequences a continuing shape: the harm affects how Mila inhabits her body and manages later encounters, not only how she remembers one night.

Ferré also directly disputes Alexandre’s claim at trial that Mila had experienced pleasure. She rejects that claim alongside the idea that Mila wanted the encounter or welcomed being insulted, and argues that Alexandre knew she did not want sexual intercourse. Her address links the case to the wider climate of women speaking publicly after the Weinstein scandal and the spread of #MeToo and #BalanceTonPorc. Ferré presents that change as historically significant but unfinished: women are increasingly able to tell what happened to them, yet listening and protection remain necessary.

The address culminates in a demand that the jurors place shame with the aggressor, not the complainant. Ferré says that Alexandre has damaged Mila physically and psychologically and hopes that she may eventually rebuild a life that the assault disrupted. She does not claim to know what verdict the jurors will reach or what sentence they will impose. Instead, she asks them to recognize the disparity between a brief act and its enduring consequences, describing the twenty minutes of the assault as having imposed a figurative life sentence on Mila. The image crystallizes her argument: the court’s decision concerns Alexandre’s responsibility, but its attention must also remain with the years of suffering Mila has had to carry.