Vérité judiciaire et vérités subjectives

Vérité judiciaire et vérités subjectives is the distinction between conflicting personal accounts of an encounter and the legal finding a court must reach about it. In Alexandre Farel’s trial, the defense presents this distinction as the reason the jurors cannot equate Mila Wizman’s suffering with proof of rape. Yet the argument also exposes the strain in that separation: the court is asked to decide what happened, while the decisive scene remains inaccessible and the competing perceptions cannot be reconciled.

Two accounts of the same encounter

In his closing address, Alexandre’s lawyer, Maître Célérier, tells the jurors that there are two truths: two ways of seeing the same scene. Alexandre, he says, has consistently maintained his innocence; Mila understands the encounter through her own perception of it. Célérier’s formulation does not resolve the conflict. Instead, it makes the divergence itself central to the jurors’ task, warning them not to treat either person’s account as a transparent record of events.

The lawyer also recognizes that Mila’s suffering is real, while challenging whether the evidence establishes the particular crime charged. He urges the jurors to distinguish their response to Alexandre’s manner—his arrogance, privileged background, crude speech, and conspicuous self-presentation—from the question of whether he penetrated Mila by force, knowing she did not consent. Personal dislike, in this framing, cannot stand in for proof. The distinction is both an appeal to impartiality and a narrowing of what the jurors are asked to judge.

The scene that cannot be recovered

Célérier identifies the limits of what the trial can establish with unusual precision: no one will ever know exactly what happened in the room between 11:20 p.m. and 12:05 a.m. on the night of January 11–12, 2016, except the two people involved. Witness testimony and subsequent accounts can generate suppositions, fantasies, even fiction, but do not make the encounter fully available to the court. The fixed interval gives the uncertainty a concrete boundary: the trial can examine what came before and after, but the decisive moment remains disputed.

His argument then supplies a proposed account of the surrounding circumstances. Mila was not forced to attend the party, drink, or follow Alexandre to a separate room to smoke, he contends; she chose to go and to remain. He characterizes the encounter as ordinary sex between two adults and says Alexandre neither threatened her with a knife nor threatened her at all. These are the defense’s claims, not a resolution endorsed by the narrative. Their force depends on treating choices preceding the encounter as evidence for interpreting what occurred within it—a link the conflict between the parties’ perceptions leaves unsettled.

Different histories, different interpretations

The defense explains the disparity in perception through the two young people’s different backgrounds and relationships to sexuality. Célérier describes Mila as coming from an ultra-practising Jewish milieu in which what happened in the room was unfamiliar and, in retrospect, unacceptable to her. Alexandre, by contrast, is presented as socially experienced and accustomed to casual sex. The same encounter, on this account, could acquire different meanings for people with different histories; that difference helps explain the conflict but does not, by itself, determine whether consent was given.

The lawyer further argues that the two are not as unlike one another as their class and educational circumstances suggest. Alexandre is a brilliant student from an affluent background; Mila has fewer advantages and no diploma. Yet Célérier identifies a shared fear of social judgment and a sense that both lives have been damaged. The parallel complicates a simple opposition between privileged accused and disadvantaged complainant, even as the case turns on their unequal circumstances and sharply different capacities to narrate experience in court.

The legal truth and its limits

Célérier makes the distinction explicit through the rule that an acquittal for rape does not establish that the complainant consented. If the jurors acquit Alexandre, he argues, they may be finding insufficient proof of criminal intent or concluding that the accused could have misunderstood the complainant’s intentions—not affirming that her experience was consensual. The legal outcome, then, can answer a narrower question than the personal one. A verdict may determine whether the charge has been proved without deciding which subjective account contains the whole truth.

The lawyer invokes that distinction while advancing a clear defense position: the case is one person’s word against another’s, and doubt should benefit Alexandre. He urges the jurors to imagine his understanding of the situation—an adult woman following him to a room late at night after flirtation at a party—and says nothing presented at trial contradicts his belief that they would have sex. His appeal to perspective is therefore not neutral. It asks the jury to enter the accused’s understanding, while Mila’s experience remains acknowledged as suffering but is not treated as sufficient proof of coercion.

An unresolved conflict

The speech places the demand for judicial truth against accounts of social class, shame, the Weinstein case, and the MeToo movement. Célérier warns that emotional appeals and media judgment can displace the narrow legal task of deciding Alexandre’s acts. He invokes the presumption of innocence and insists that jurors must act as impartial judges, not as combatants in a broader political cause. The contrast reveals what is at stake in his rhetoric: separating the criminal verdict from public condemnation, while resisting the social frameworks that might shape how the evidence is read.

The novel does not make the separation comfortable. Célérier says the trial cannot recover the exact event, acknowledges that Mila’s pain is real, and nevertheless asks the jurors to acquit on the basis of doubt. The result is a sharp distinction without a final reconciliation: subjective truths remain in conflict, while judicial truth must take the form of a decision under evidentiary limits. The law may close the case, but that closure cannot turn an acquittal into proof of consent or restore the unknowable scene to certainty.