Priscilla Majani has always accused her ex-husband and the father of her daughter of incestuous acts on the latter. His complaint had been dismissed.
“I would have done like her.” Judged this Wednesday afternoon on appeal for abducting his daughter for 11 years and remove her from the custody of her former husband whom she has accused for years of incestuous acts, Priscilla Majani, 47, has received a wave of support from anonymous people and personalities.
Protective or manipulative mother as her former companion claims? All court decisions have hitherto been unfavorable to this woman sentenced at first instance to 5 years in prison, the heaviest sentence she faced. The Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal requested the same sentence, accompanied by four years.
A first complaint and the run
Priscilla Majani and Alain Chauvet met in 1993. From this relationship between the former military engineer and this man, 27 years her senior, was born a little girl named Camille in 2005. Very quickly, the couple tore themselves apart and in 2008, a divorce proceedings are initiated. Justice pronounces joint custody for the girl, the mother asked for sole custody.
In 2011, Priscilla Majani filed a complaint against her ex-husband for raping her daughter. The child is heard by the police three times, according to the Mélanie protocol. She talks about the violence committed by her father. “He did all the harm on earth to me. He’s mean. It was mom who told me to say that,” said the little girl. During the second audition, she says she forgot to say that her dad puts “his penis in her buttocks”.
“Everyone can draw from it what they want”, summed up the president of the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal during the viewing of these hearings last September.
But the experts note them the character “recitative” of the remarks of the child. Despite a report from a unit specializing in the protection of children in a Parisian hospital, the investigation is closed without further action.
“When she returns, as she has not presented the child to the father, she will be taken into police custody in a rather violent way. She will understand not only that Camille will not be protected and that in addition it will turn against her”, explains today her lawyer, Me Myriam Guedj Benayoun.
Priscilla Majani and her daughter then flee.
A conviction last September
Priscilla Majani was arrested during a banal road check in Switzerland in February 2022. For eleven years, the mother and daughter lived according to her in different countries, without further details, before stabilizing in Switzerland. She was extradited last August and tried in September by the Toulon criminal court for “slanderous denunciation” and “child abduction”.
Since the start of her run, Priscilla Majani has already been tried in her absence on three occasions and was sentenced to a total of six years in prison for “non-representation of a minor”, “slanderous denunciation”, and “child abduction”. “.
Before the court last September, the forty-year-old assumes, and claims to have wanted to protect her daughter, saying that she was not heard by French justice in 2011. The court makes a completely different reading of history and sentences her to five years in prison. ‘imprisonment.
“If your daughter made these statements, it’s because they were suggested to her. You believe that your daughter is the victim and I agree with you. Your daughter is a victim to have been deprived of her father and of a normal childhood”, decides the president of the court.
The daughter files a complaint against her father.
Priscilla Majani has appealed her conviction and is now in pre-trial detention at Baumettes prison in Marseille. His daughter Camille was placed under curatorship in Switzerland. The authorities “told me that the little one had a problem, that we had to take it easy,” Alain Chauvet told BFMTV last March.
Last November, the 16-year-old girl filed a complaint against her father for acts of psychological, physical and sexual violence with the Swiss justice system. Things from his childhood.
On January 1, 2023, Camille Chauvet speaks, face hidden, in a video on Youtube. “My mother has always acted in order to protect me,” said the young woman, fists clenched. She claims that her father “locked her in a room without light (…) he could leave me there for several hours until I fell asleep on the floor”. She assures that she was not taken seriously by the police when she was heard in the context of the complaint filed by her mother.
“I felt safe for the first time, I had my mother by my side and that’s all that mattered to me, says the teenager about Priscilla Majani’s flight abroad. Our departure was the happiest day of my life, at that moment I understood that I would no longer suffer the tortures of my father which made me suffer so much.”
“The mother must have told her every day: ‘your father is a rapist, your father is mean, your father hit you’, etc… It’s not ‘dad’ that she’s going to m ‘to call is ‘Monsieur’, and even if she wants to see me”, feared Alain Chauvet, who has always denied the facts with which he is accused.
“She is absolutely not a protective mother. The reality is that she brought up her child to tell a version. She never stopped slandering her child and manipulating her husband with the intention of depriving her of his father and vice versa”, estimates Me Olivier Ferri, the lawyer of the septuagenarian.
Wave of support on social networks
Following Priscilla Majani’s conviction last September, many Internet users supported the mother under the hashtag #PricillaMajani and with the slogan “I would have done like her”.
At the origin of this initiative, the actress Eva Darlan, very involved in the fight against violence against women and who chaired the support committee for Jacqueline Sauvage.
“She was revolted by this story, by the fact that Ms. Majani was sentenced to five years (in prison, editor’s note) in the first instance and that children were left under the authority of a hypothetically abusive parent, according to the word of the child, in the name of the presumption of innocence”, explained Me Myriam Guedj Benayoun to BFM Toulon Var.
Enora Malagré, Alex Lutz and actress Catherine Marchal posted a photo on their respective social networks with the famous hashtag #PriscillaMajani.
“What these personalities and these anonymous people want is for us to hear the voice of the child”, concludes Me Myriam Guedj Benayoun.
In parallel, a petition “Relax for Priscilla Majani” was launched. It counts more than 12,000 signatures.
