Jean-Christophe Quenot, accused in Paris of raping and sexually assaulting 25 boys aged 10 to 17 in Malaysia, acknowledges all his abuses. He explained to the state criminal court that he had made “mistakes” in interpreting consent in these paid relationships.
“Do you recognize this boy?” asks Laurent Raviot, the president of the Paris departmental criminal court, 25 times. A succession of youthful faces appear on the courtroom screens, photos of children smiling, looking innocent and having thin bodies. The faces of 25 Malaysian children identified by investigators as victims of Jean-Christophe Quenot, the 55-year-old Frenchman who has been in court since Friday.
This Monday afternoon was dedicated to his questioning about the allegations made by the judiciary: six rapes and 19 sexual assaults. Jean-Christophe Quenot stands in the box, his arms crossed behind his back or one hand in his pocket, with the other holding on to the bar in front of him. He has hardly any memories of the children, of the underage prostitutes over 10 years younger, 17 years for the eldest. Children that he nevertheless filmed and wrote everything down in his notebooks, which were used by the investigators.
“I only saw it once (…) no, I don’t remember (…) I don’t remember, but since it’s in my notes… And then there must be the video,” replies Jean – Christophe Quenot, urged by the President of the Departmental Criminal Court, who lists all the alleged facts in an even tone, without emphasis. “I remember his backpack, but not his face,” he finally confessed about a 14-year-old boy. The defendant doesn’t take his eyes off the photos of his victims.
An attraction to minors that came “gradually.”
In Malaysia, the Frenchman, who has lived in Asia since 1990, admits to having had “a good hundred” sexual relationships with little boys, for which he paid a few euros. The attraction to a youthful physique “came very gradually,” he says, beginning in 1997. “At some point I turned to male prostitutes more and more. They were getting younger and younger, they were the same age as the boy I fell in love with when I was 20.”
According to him, his first paid relationship with a minor was in 1994. Jean-Christophe Quenot was 30 years old at the time, and the minors they met in parks were half or even three times younger. Until 2019 and his arrest, he gave French lessons to students at a language center in Singapore, in parallel with a sex life that he now describes as “illegal.” How can we explain that he did not mistreat his students?
“If I had tried to seduce one of my students, it would have been disastrous for him,” he says matter-of-factly.
“So why have sexual relationships with minors from disadvantaged backgrounds who prostitute themselves for a few euros?” Years. “I made a mistake,” begins Jean-Christophe Quenot, who has been taking part in group therapy in prison since September.
“I thought they were indestructible”
Real awareness or trivialization of the facts he is accused of? “I thought they were indestructible,” says Jean-Christophe Quenot. “The minors I met knew the street, they came from an environment where we easily got into fights, we raced on bikes, on scooters. They sometimes ended up on the street.” After the fall, they had incredible wounds. It felt like nothing was touching her.”
Although he now recognizes that consent is “subtle,” Jean-Christophe Quenot believes he gave these children the choice. “I arranged to meet them at the hotel 10 to 15 minutes later, it “was important because it allowed them to change their minds,” he reassures. Before brushing aside any coercion on his part: “There is no physical coercion and yet it is there.” In my particular case, the form of coercion in all its insidiousness was peer pressure.”
In view of these “always smiling” children, the defendant congratulates himself on giving them a few extra euros for food, for buying bandages for injuries or for their birthday. “In front of me they had incredible composure,” he adds.
– “Did you ask them questions about themselves?” the president is still trying to understand.
– “Ah, unfortunately my Malay is very bad… And once I was in the room, I had no time to waste…” he immediately answers with a smile.
Furthermore, Jean-Christophe Quenot does not consider himself a dangerous criminal. “By physical violence, I was talking about sexual violence that goes hand in hand with physical violence, which would be different than sexual violence,” he agrees.
“I think in her case it was better to be careful. In my case, in the first few days when they came to my hotel room, they were not at risk, but when they went to the room of a man three times older than them, it could be dangerous. There is a certain level of violence, it remains to be seen which spectrum of violence I fall into.” “And where are you?” Céline Astolfe, the lawyer for the children’s foundation, asks me.
“I’m not at the top of that scale,” pleads the man described as “the most verbose” criminal investigators have ever seen.