At the Paris Assize Court,

They trusted him, but fell into a trap. One by one, the four victims of IB, 27, who has been on trial since Wednesday by the Paris Assize Court, are painfully recalling the events that occurred in November and December 2022. Aged between their twenties and forties, they have different profiles but seem to have been chosen according to specific physical criteria: they are not very strong, most of them not very tall, thus allowing their future attacker to “see if he had the physical upper hand”, as he explained to the court.

They all met him on a dating app, where he introduced himself under the pseudonym “looking for submissive white man in cellars”. They went to his home in the 18th arrondissement of Paris. They went down to his cellar, convinced that they were heading towards a no-strings-attached sexual relationship. And they all recount the turning point. When they reached the end of the tunnel in the basement, some were insulted, all threatened with reprisals, with death, with a knife, sometimes held to their throat. Two of them remember a butcher’s knife. In court, the accused, who admitted to the four attacks, denied the homophobic insults and threats. But he could not explain why these men, who had not known each other before, would all have lied. IB faces life imprisonment.

A repeating modus operandi

“I didn’t have time to turn around, he pushed me to the ground, I fell, I was completely stuck,” says Paul*. That day, he says, he felt cornered by the knife brandished by his attacker when the latter sat on him, preventing him from moving his legs. And the violence “escalated”, he trembled in court. Despite the blade under his neck, he tried to defend himself: “the more I screamed for help, for help, the more he hit me in the stomach, the neck, the head”. “I’m going to kill you, shut up”, his attacker told him, he said, ordering him to give him his cell phone. Paul complied but refused to give him his code. He heard “get out” and managed to leave the residence.

The following testimonies support the theory of a specific modus operandi. Contact or allow yourself to be contacted on a dating site, ask the weight and height of the person you are talking to, then quickly switch to the Snapchat application to continue the discussion until the meeting. It was once in his cellar that IB took action four times by extorting the phone – sometimes the wallet or watch – of his victims, armed with a sharp object.

For Simon* as for Martin*, the transition to Snapchat helped to foster a certain feeling of confidence. Because on Snapchat, you identify yourself, you have a photo. Especially since “he mastered the codes of conversations between gays on dating apps,” Martin adds. What’s more, “he sent me a video of his private parts erect,” shares Jérôme*.

Trapped in a game of trust

When Simon gets lost leaving the Guy Môquet station in Paris to go to the accused’s home, he is contacted on video by the man who had arranged to meet him. “Which reinforces the security aspect,” he insists in court. A feeling further reinforced by the few precautions taken by the accused: giving his home address, using photos and videos of himself and his personal Snapchat account. Especially when IB meets a neighbor and exchanges a few words with him, without revealing any suspicious behavior.

But once again, everything goes wrong when the victim reaches the end of this long, dark corridor, whose floor is covered with empty plastic bottles, anti-Covid-19 masks and other waste littering the legs of stacked plastic chairs. These chairs will be placed on the victims’ backs at the end of the attack, “in a final form of humiliation”, observes Simon. Before finally being freed from this hold, one detail will remain etched in his memory. That of the sound of the knife blade against the pipes. Symbol of this “feeling of omnipotence overtaking me, this unhealthy side of playing at scaring, at intimidating me”.

Martin also obeys his attacker and gets on his knees. It is when IB lifts his T-shirt that he sees a butcher’s blade. The fear of having his throat cut overwhelms him when he feels the blade on the “right side of the throat”. “I thought I was going to die”. “He tells me ‘shut your mouth or I’ll slit your throat'”, he continues. Martin is categorical: he hears “dirty big faggot, dirty big fucking faggot”.

A distrust established

Only Jérôme had a doubt, feeling a certain pressure from the accused. He went anyway, going down the stairs which did not lead to a garage as agreed but to a cellar, while he had expressed his reluctance for this kind of place. Today, he still thinks he was “wrong” and has difficulty getting rid of this feeling of guilt.

Assailed by the fear of dying, “I thought about my family, my friends, I told myself that no one was going to find me if my throat was cut there,” he described to the court, recalling “endless minutes.” “I just felt stupid, I thought everything was going to be fine and I found myself like a poor defenseless animal,” he added.

While struggling or “trying to protect himself”, as he corrects himself, Paul will finally realize once in the street that he was injured in the ear, in the back but especially in the left hand. “It was bleeding a lot”. After several operations, he no longer has any feeling. A reality that is difficult to accept when you play the piano.

Paul is the only one with physical scars, but everyone is struggling to recover from a psychological point of view. The hardest part is the anxiety, the fear of others, the lack of confidence. And the resumption of a sex life. If Paul has managed to reconnect with a new man, it is still “very complicated, it will take time,” he says emotionally at the bar. I am trying to rebuild myself but it is very difficult. If he [l’accusé] “I would go out, I would move, I would leave, I am still very afraid.”

*All victims’ names have been changed.