Ramadan was tried for rapes committed against three different women, in the French city of Lyon, in 2009, and in Paris, in 2012 and 2016. In each instance, the assaults took place in hotel rooms. The victims, who had all admired the intellectual figure, whom they had come into contact with through social media, gave similar accounts of the extremely violent way Ramadan forced them into sexual intercourse during these brief encounters, which involved beatings, insults and humiliation.
'Certainty of his own omnipotence' According to the ruling, the criminal court saw Ramadan's behavior as reflecting a "denial of others" and an "annihilation" of the victims' humanity. "In the certainty of his own omnipotence, he showed himself incapable of self-reflection," the court found, describing a "campaign of psychological destruction of the plaintiffs. " Ramadan has denied that there had been any coercion during the encounters, after initially denying that sexual intercourse had occurred at all, at the start of the investigation. Prior to this decision, the French courts had been particularly inconsistent in the way they handled Ramadan's criminal case. In 2023, the two magistrates tasked with the investigation into the case ordered him to stand trial for rapes against four women, in line with the public prosecutor's initial recommendations. A few months later, a prosecutor at a Paris appeals court recommended that only one charge, for aggravated rape in 2009, should be covered. The investigators ultimately decided on the triple charge that led to Wednesday's verdict. These are not Ramadan's first criminal convictions. In 2024, he was found guilty on appeal in Switzerland, for raping a woman in 2008 in a Geneva hotel - after being found not guilty in an initial trial. He was sentenced to three years in prison, of which two years were suspended. That sentence has not yet been enforced. The Islamic scholar has appealed to the European Court of Human Rights and filed a request for a retrial in this case, which is currently under review.
Islamic scholar #TariqRamadan sentenced to 18 years in prison for raping 3 women in 'campaign of psychological destruction', he was found guilty by a Paris criminal court after a trial he did not attend, despite a court-ordered medical assessment stating he was fit to stand trial archive.ph/jOJcE
