Tariq Ramadan: three years in prison, including 18 months firm, required against Islamologist for rape

Europe 1 with AFP / Photo credits: Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP 21:55 p.m., May 16, 2023

The first Geneva prosecutor on Tuesday requested three years in prison, half of which is firm against the Swiss Islamologist Tariq Ramadan, accused of raping a woman in 2008 in Geneva, which he denies. This is the first rape trial facing Tariq Ramadan, now 60, but he is threatened with a trial in France for similar offences. "It will be necessary to set a custodial sentence of 3 years, 18 months firm, 18 suspended," said the first prosecutor Adrian Holloway, addressing the three judges of the criminal court of Geneva, on the second day of a very followed hearing.

>> READ ALSO - INFO EUROPE 1 - A fourth complaint filed in France against Tariq Ramadan

"He acted to satisfy his sexual desire for a woman whom he used as an object. He did not hesitate to make this nightmare last for several hours," he said. The prosecutor highlighted the "consistency" of the complainant's remarks as well as the evaluations of psychiatrists, who speak of rape. As for the messages with love connotations that she sent him after the fact, it is because she was "in a state of shock, dissociation", he argued.

A complaint filed ten years after the fact

The complainant - who chose the pseudonym "Brigitte" to protect herself from threats - claims that the Islamologist subjected her to brutal sexual acts accompanied by beatings and insults on the night of October 28, 2008. She filed a complaint ten years later, in 2018. "My client has always said that she was not in a logic of revenge. His reparation goes through the recognition of rape and is not measured in years in prison, "responded to AFP his lawyer, François Zimeray, after the indictment. In a calm and very sure voice, the complainant said she was "afraid of dying" under the blows of Tariq Ramadan: "I was hit... and raped," she said, uttering the last word with difficulty.

Lending her support to her husband, Iman Ramadan attacked at the helm women who "instrumentalize the #MeToo movement". More unexpected support for the Islamologist came from Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala, a French comedian convicted of anti-Semitic insults and incitement to hatred, with whom the complainant collaborated as a talent agent. His name appears in an anonymous letter recently received by the Swiss judges. To the magistrates, Dieudonné said he had collected in 2009, in the presence of other people, the confidences of "Brigitte" about his consensual and non-violent relationship with the preacher. A version of the facts that the complainant refuted. The trial of the Swiss intellectual, a charismatic and contested figure in European Islam, is due to end on Wednesday. The judgement is expected on 24 May.

>> READ ALSO - EXCLUSIVE - Before the judges, Tariq Ramadan denounces an instruction "under political influence"

Tariq Ramadan admitted to kissing her

Tariq Ramadan assures that it is the complainant who invited herself to his hotel room. He admits to kissing her, before ending the exchange. According to the indictment, however, he was guilty of "rape three times" at night and "sexual coercion". "My face was on fire, my ears were ringing, my vision was blurred," she said. After that night, she continued to correspond with him in the hope of understanding his gesture: "If he had found the words to explain to me what happened, there could have been a reconciliation."

Doctor of the University of Geneva, where he wrote a thesis on the founder of the Egyptian Islamist brotherhood of the Muslim Brotherhood who was his grandfather, Tariq Ramadan was professor of contemporary Islamic studies at the University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom, and invited to many universities in Morocco, Malaysia, Japan or Qatar. In France, he is suspected of raping four women between 2009 and 2016, a case that triggered his downfall in 2017.