His long, stringy hair was unwashed. His clothes were seedy. His tone was matter-of-fact, at times flippant.
Franck Vergondy, a 36-year-old welfare recipient, was the very picture of banality as he stood answering questions in court last week, accused of orchestrating the largest child-sex ring ever prosecuted in France. It is being called the biggest criminal proceeding in the country's history, a case with 66 defendants, 45 victims, 60 lawyers and 225 witnesses - a trial so enormous a special courtroom had to be constructed to accommodate it.
It took three days to read the 430-page description of the charges: a litany of horrors portraying a group of parents and friends who passed around their children for sexual pleasure; who sold prepubescent bodies for cigarettes and booze; who sipped coffee in Vergondy's government-financed apartment while their toddlers screamed "it hurts" in the next room.
Twenty-seven of the accused are women. The victims, girls and boys, ranged in age from six months to 16 years. Some of the defendants have confessed, lawyers said.
Vergondy's 61-year-old father, who served nine years for molesting him and is accused of raping his grandchildren weeks after he emerged from prison, told the court Thursday: "My kids, I don't love them. I never took care of them. I didn't give a damn."
The case is more than just a harrowing glimpse into the depths of human depravity, however: It has exposed what child advocates describe as a dysfunctional system in France for monitoring troubled families. It also is the latest in a series of large-scale pedophile cases being prosecuted in Europe, where some countries have been slow to come to grips with the long-taboo subjects of incest and sexual abuse.
In a scenario of the sort that Americans - Philadelphians and New Jerseyans included - know well, some of the children and parents in the Angers case already were being monitored by child-welfare workers. Those workers either missed the signs of abuse or couldn't persuade police to act, depending on which account is to be believed. Three of the accused were convicted sex offenders under court monitoring, lawyers said.
And yet, in contrast to many such cases in the United States, there has been little outcry against the child-protection agency or the police and no public accounting by the agency for what went wrong.
No social worker has lost a job over the affair, lawyers said, and there has been no separate government investigation beyond the criminal trial, where some social workers will be called as witnesses. The French news media are covering the Angers pedophile case more as a criminal drama than as a failure by the government to protect its weakest citizens.
Child advocates are calling on the government to expand the investigative authority of social workers and to improve coordination with law enforcement. But they are doing so in decidedly measured tones.
"To attack the social services and find somebody responsible is not a helpful debate," said Guenaelle Madec of La Voix de l'Enfant (Voice of the Child), a national advocacy organization that works closely with the government.
"The abuse took place within the family circle, which makes it very difficult for others to see what's happening," Madec said. "These people also were unemployed, so they had almost no contact with other people outside their families. Also, it took place in a small city;... in France, outside of Paris, it's a different way of thinking, where you keep secrets in the family."
Ronald Sokol, an American lawyer who has lived and practiced law in France since 1969, said he had long observed that kind of passivity here in the face of apparent negligence.
"One of the first things that struck me when I moved here was the lack of outrage," he said. "All kinds of things come up which in the U.S. would provoke fury, and here, they don't. There's a kind of fatalism."
The French press is not an aggressive watchdog, he said, and "the government controls so much here and has so much power and subsidizes so many things that people are reluctant to criticize it."
Sign-waving protesters marched in Angers last week, but they were part of a nationwide strike against pending labor changes, including to France's mandatory 35-hour workweek.
Key facts about the Angers pedophile case - including what, if anything, social workers knew or said about the abuse - have not been made public, and the story should unfold slowly in a trial that is expected to last four months.
What is known is that the charges cover a period from 1999 to 2002 and that much of the abuse took place in a tidy government housing project where Vergondy lived with his wife, also a defendant, and two children. Angers, a city of about 156,000 people on the Loire River, 165 miles from Paris, is known for its historic chateau and as the home of Cointreau liqueur.
The housing development was middle-class - "You could live there, I could live there," Deputy Mayor Michelle Moreau said - but the Vergondys and their friends were not. Neighbors said the children were ill-clothed and unkempt and the apartment was messy. Most of the defendants were living off France's generous welfare state, and some are barely literate.
"This is not the Third World, this is the Fourth World," said Monika Pasquini, a lawyer representing two defendants. "Many of the accused are slightly mentally retarded, and most of them were abused as children, so, you know, the notion of good and evil doesn't really apply."
Authorities got their first sign of the case when a 16-year-old girl complained of being raped by her mother's boyfriend and his brother in 2000, according to news reports. It is not clear why authorities waited until the end of 2001 to open a formal investigation.
Vergondy and 38 others face 20 years in prison if convicted on charges of child rape and "aggravated procuring" in a prostitution ring. The rest are charged with sexual violence against minors and failure to report the crimes, charges that carry sentences of up to 10 years.
Lawyers say that some suspects in the case remain at large and that the investigation is ongoing.
The defendants began answering questions in court last week about their personal histories, including whether they were abused as children. They were not required to speak, but silence could be held against them, unlike in the U.S. judicial system. So they took their places, one by one, before the lawyers, jurors and investigating magistrates, in a cavernous courtroom crowded with relatives, journalists and police officers.
Vergondy's courtroom demeanor "was strange, because he showed no emotion," said lawyer Alain Fouquet, who represents 11 alleged victims, including a 9-year-old girl said to have been raped by 45 people. "We were expecting him to say, 'It's not true, I love my children.' "
Instead, Vergondy said he had contemplated suicide, Fouquet said. In an unlawyerly moment, Fouquet added that perhaps the defendant should have gone through with it.
The Angers children have been placed in foster care. None of them will testify in court; the jury will watch their statements on video. Many of the youngsters show signs of precocious sexual awareness and of posttraumatic stress, lawyers said.
"Many of these children are damaged for life," said lawyer Jacques Monier, who represents 11 victims. "They will never recover." |
