A Paris criminal court has called on Swiss-based professor Tariq Ramadan to face the "extreme gravity" of his actions after he was sentenced to 18 years in prison for raping three women.
The hearing took place in the absence of Ramadan, 63. His lawyers said he was hospitalised in Switzerland due to a "flare-up" of multiple sclerosis.
Ramadan, who is the grandson of the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was found guilty of rape and also of rape of a vulnerable person – a disabled woman who has gone by the pseudonym Christelle. The court called for an arrest warrant to be enforced.
The trial, which started on March 2 and ended on Wednesday, was held behind closed doors at Christelle's request.
In all three cases, judges described violent encounters in hotel rooms between Ramadan and his victims with whom he had first established an online relationship. “Consenting to sexuality is not consenting to any sexual act whatsoever,” said the president of the court, Corinne Goetzmann, adding that there was “no impossibility of withdrawing one’s consent”.
'Extreme gravity'
Judges also upheld an arrest warrant issued against Ramadan on March 6, after he failed to appear in court. His sentence is justified by the "extreme gravity of the facts", the court said.
Henda Ayari, who went public with her accusations against Ramadan nearly a decade ago in the wake of the #MeToo movement, expressed relief after the sentencing. "The judges believed me, just like the others, and I'm thinking of those who were absent," Ms Ayari said after the latest verdict. "It's been nine years of suffering and struggle. I was right to believe in justice."
Her lawyer, David-Olivier Kaminski, hailed the sentence as “an important act of justice,” stating that despite the defendant’s absence, there had been “a fair trial.” The court also examined the case of a third unnamed woman who was raped in 2016.
In an op-ed, written shortly after Ms Ayari filed a lawsuit against Ramadan in 2017 and five years after he assaulted her in Paris, she said she first approached him at a time in her life when she felt "lost and weak". "Abusing one's religious or intellectual authority to abuse a believing woman is horrible," she wrote.
Ramadan has been previously sentenced by a Swiss court to three years in prison, two of them suspended, for raping a Muslim convert in Geneva hotel. His appeal was rejected last year and his lawyers have said he would take the case to Europe's rights court.
In French law, Ramadan is allowed to appeal against the verdict and ask for a retrial.
Incriminating texts
During investigations, Ramadan at first denied that he had ever invited the women to his hotel room. His version of events was, however, tested in 2018 when it was revealed that police had examined Christelle's phone which contained hundreds of text messages with Ramadan dating back to the night he raped her in 2009.
She said he had invited her to his room after speaking at the hotel bar and that as soon as she entered, he had assaulted her in a variety of ways. The text messages, revealed by newspaper Le Monde, backed her version of events. “I sensed your discomfort … sorry for my ‘violence’. I liked it … Do you want more? Not disappointed?” he wrote to her the next day. A few hours later, he wrote: “You didn’t like it … I’m sorry [Christelle]. Sorry.”
Speaking to daily Le Parisien after the verdict on Wednesday, Ramadan pushed back against claims by the court that he was well enough to attend the trial. His multiple sclerosis had been found to be "stable".
He insisted he was innocent and said he had proof of his innocence which judges refused to examine, without giving further details. He described the sentence as an attempt by "political powers … to remove a Muslim intellectual".
