Jean-Christophe Quenot, a 55-year-old French teacher who has lived in Asia for 30 years, went on trial in Malaysia over a first series of rapes and sexual assaults on children aged 10 to 17.
Jean-Christophe Quenot expressed his “regret” shortly before the court withdrew. At the end of a grueling three-day trial that did not ignore the sordid details of the crimes accused of the defendants, this 55-year-old Frenchman, who has lived in Asia since 1990, was sentenced this Tuesday to 20 years in criminal prison. by the Paris Departmental Criminal Court for rape and sexual assault against children aged 10 to 17 in Malaysia.
The day before, this 55-year-old man with slicked-back hair, thin glasses on his nose and a hunchbacked appearance had answered the court’s questions. Jean-Christophe Quenot said he had only “few memories” of the children whose youthful faces flashed across the room’s screens and whom he never took his eyes off. However, in some cases he had increased the number of paid encounters over several months in order to engage in a range of humiliating and degrading sexual practices.
“A life that was turned to pedophilia”
“I made a mistake,” agreed the French teacher from Besançon. The court then hoped that the man would recognize his crimes. “I thought they were indestructible,” he justified himself. The minors I met knew the street, they came from an environment where we easily got into fights, we raced on bikes or scooters. Sometimes they arrived in the room after a fall, with incredible effect wounds. It felt like nothing was touching her.”
“Mr Jean-Christophe Quenot continues to pose a particular danger today to society and to the children with whom he would come into contact,” said the attorney general earlier on Tuesday in the petition against the defendant, seeking the maximum sentence provided for by law . He wanted the sentence of 20 years of criminal imprisonment to be accompanied by a two-thirds surety sentence. He also requested a commitment to social court supervision for 20 years at the end of the sentence.
The attorney general said he committed sexual abuse “on an industrial scale.” “We can say without exaggeration that Mr. Quenot’s life revolved around his pedophilia.”
The “most verbose” pedophile
On Friday, the opening day of his trial, the head of the investigation came to the details brought against Jean-Christophe Quenot. He was arrested in France in March 2019 after being arrested in Thailand in early February in a hotel room with two 14-year-old boys. Thanks to paying bail, he was able to escape and seek refuge in France, where he was picked up by his mother.
Jean-Christophe Quenot had 100,000 child pornography videos in his luggage. Pictures of all his meetings with his young victims that he had kept for years. He also recorded all the details of the sexual practices forced on the boys in notebooks. Investigators spent 5,000 hours in Malaysia between 2014 and 2017 watching these videos to try to identify the victims.
“Mr Quenot is the most prolific consumer of sexual relations with minors that my unit has ever seen,” summarized Véronique Béchu, head of the underage victims group at the Central Office for the Suppression of Violence Against Persons.
In another file that fell apart during the investigation, Jean-Christophe Quenot is suspected of hundreds of other rapes and sexual assaults in Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Indonesia.