Moi aussi Thaïs d'Escufon
When I heard what happened to Thaïs d'Escufon, I knew exactly what she experienced. Because it happened to me too. In 1992
I would like to introduce you to the story of Thaïs d’Escufon, a 26 year old French woman who in the last few days has gone viral outside of France, after she was convicted of “public insult” by the Paris public prosecutor’s office.
Why? Because, in 2023, she appeared on French television panel, discussing rapes committed by an “individual” who had committed multiple crimes and who was under a deportation order, yet had been in France since 2009. (The man, originally from the Central African Republic, has since been convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison for raping two French women on the same day, in Paris, in November 2023.)
In an argument with a fellow female panelist, who was insisting that the threat to women came from men generally, d’Escufon — who was already a well-known ‘far-right’ activist in France — replied, “immigrant, black and Arab men.”
The next day, a complaint against d’Escufon was lodged by Olivier Klein, the “delegate” for the “French Interministerial Delegation to Fight Against Racism, Antisemitism and anti-LGBT hate” (that’s the very long name for a high-level government unit that works across various French ministries to monitor hate crime.)
Following on from the complaint, the public prosecutor in Paris charged the young woman with “public insult/injury on grounds of origin, ethnicity, nation, or race” (injure publique en raison de l’origine, l’ethnie, la nation ou la race).
Last week, she was tried and convicted of this crime. While the prosecutor had made it known she wanted to imprison the young woman for four months, after a video that Thaïs made about her plight went viral, the court limited its punishment to a thousand euro fine.
I strongly recommend you watch her video. In it, she recounts how she herself was followed home by a Tunisian man, who forced his way inside her empty apartment and essentially held her captive before she was able to convince him to leave. She was terrified but mostly unharmed.
When I heard her story, I was stopped in my tracks. What happened to her — the incident with a Tunisian man, the subsequent prosecution by French authorities — shocked me. But it did not surprise me in the slightest. Because, regarding the prosecution, that is becoming the norm in Europe when dealing with crimes committed by foreign men — the system blames the victim. But her story of being attacked by a Tunisian wasn’t remotely surprising either. Because when I was 16, it happened to me.
I was in Paris for the summer, to improve my French, staying with friends of my mother’s. It was in the 20th arrondissement, which was then (and I think still is) a working class community with a lot of immigrants from north Africa.
One day, I was walking back to the friend’s apartment. It was a lovely sunny day. I was dressed head to toe in baggy black clothes — a skirt down to my ankles, a long sleeved shirt, and sun glasses. On my feet, I wore DM boots that went up to my calves — as was the fashion at the time for bookish, indie girls like me. At that age, I did not want to be seen.
As I walked down Rue de Ménilmontant, lost in my own world, I bumped into a young man about my size. I had a tendency, especially in big cities, to always walk with my head down so as not to attract attention from men. But when I physically ran into this particular guy, I had to look up at him, and we locked eyes. I immediately hurried away. But I already knew I was in trouble.
He began following me, staying close behind. Whispering things, trying to get me to talk to him. I ignored him. Walked faster and more purposefully. It was the middle of the day. The street was crowded. I had a fair few blocks to go before I got to the place where I was staying. I was so accustomed to being cat-called, followed, chatted up on the street, that at first I was fairly confident that I could lose him.
I was wrong. I could not shake him. Soon, it became apparent that he was not going to give up. The door to my building was approaching fast.
I started to worry. Did I keep walking, so that he would not know where I lived? But until what point? How far would I have to go? I was surrounded on the street by Arabs — some women, but a lot of men. I could go into a shop, I thought. But then what? I was an odd looking white girl who wasn’t even French, I certainly did not feel confident that if I asked for help, it would be forthcoming.
I decided to make a break for the door, in the hope that I would get into the building faster than he could follow me.
But when I broke into a sprint, so did he. I got the door open, stepped inside, but he was right behind me and even though I tried to close the door on him, he was stronger. He pushed his way in.
So there I was, in a pitch black corridor, this stranger grabbing me from behind. At the end of the corridor, was a courtyard. The courtyard was bathed in daylight, and the door to the apartment was there. But before I could get into the light, I had to do something about this creep who, by this point, had me in a headlock.
Now that I’m 50 years old, the reaction I had at the time to this frightening situation surprises me. I immediately went into fight mode. Since he wasn’t that big, I was able to turn around with him hanging off me, and then slam myself backwards into the wall — with him taking the force of all those blows against the wall. I looked down, and saw he was wearing sandals. So I stomped my DM-clad feet as hard as I could into his exposed toes. We ricocheted down the corridor this way. But I was not strong enough to get him off me.
Tumbling out into the open courtyard, he got the better of me and shoved me against the wall, right at the door to the apartment. Now I was completely stuck. His face was close to my face. He was kissing me, groping my breasts and trying to reach between my legs. I was squirming and fighting back.
So, totally caught by this man, we began to talk. Negotiate even. Exactly as Thaïs describes with her attacker. He laid out his case. He told me he was from Tunisia. He was 19. He had just arrived in France. He was desperately lonely. He asked me where I was from. When I replied, Ireland, he beamed, and almost became sycophantic. You are foreign here, just like me!
He tried bargaining with me. Just let me see your eyes, he said. If you let me see your eyes, I will leave. I refused and refused — I am extremely stubborn. But eventually, I agreed. I took of my sunglasses. He marvelled at my eye colour. I still remember his eye colour, very light brown, almost a topaz. The forced intimacy was repugnant. His desperation was bewildering.
But he did not leave. Instead, he made a new request, of some other part of me he could access. I got angry. I have a temper. I smacked him in the face.
And then, terrifyingly, he went from conciliatory, pleading and transactional — to angry and threatening. He grabbed my wrist. Do not hit me, he said in a low voice. I do not hit you, so you do not hit me. And at that point, it finally dawned on me that , really and truly, I was at his mercy. I had miscalculated: his size and his willingness to allow me to fight back, I took as a sign that he wasn’t that dangerous, that he wasn’t a full grown man. I realised that actually, as far as he was concerned, he had been trying to access me sexually the easy way. And that if I continued to resist and fight, he would do it the hard way.
On a terrace above us, another man appeared. He was, maybe, the building’s custodian and he too was foreign — my guess at the time was he looked Somalian or something like that. He watched us from above. I was afraid if I asked him for help, not only would he not help, he would join in.
From then on, I acquiesced. There was no way I was going to risk opening the door to the empty apartment. So I gritted my teeth and did what the Tunisian asked me to do. For the sake of decorum, I won’t specify, but on a scale of 1 to 10, it was about a 6.5 or 7. I was a virgin. In the aftermath, I developed a somewhat reckless attitude towards my encounters with men, and I came to despise and fear what was left of my innocence. So I quickly got rid of it.
That was in 1992.
In the early 1970’s, my mother was accosted on the Parisian Metro by an Arab man, who sat down on the bench next to her, and began fondling himself. After trying to ignore him, she dumped the French fries she was eating onto his crotch. (I guess I take after my mother.) In response, he hit her so hard, one of her shoes flew off her foot and onto the train tracks. No one on the Metro tried to help her.
I marvel not just at how much young women have been in the firing line for generations. Historically, young women have always been preyed upon by men. But even more, I marvel at how this continued to be ignored by a society that deemed itself enlightened, well-ordered, advanced, safe.
Note how I state the ethnicities of these men, but I am not making a larger sociological point. Nor am I being brave in recounting some ‘trauma’ — it affected me for a time, then receded into the corners of my memory. All I’m doing, upon hearing Thaïs’s story — is saying, me too. Moi aussi. Oh the irony.
Just by doing that, I am — like Thaïs did on French television — speaking what is unspeakable in many quarters.
Obviously, us women know that white men are predators too. Obviously, we know this. But the fact is that we open ourselves up to condemnation when we say: look at all these sex crimes being committed by men who are not white! Face this truth! It doesn’t make crimes by white men disappear or matter less, but just FACE THIS TRUTH!
The liberal power structure cannot. To face this truth would bring about the end of the liberal power structure.
The cognitive dissonance this has caused is in part what is driving liberal elites quite literally insane. To the point where a female prosecutor would look at this young woman and demand she go to prison for simply speaking out loud what she had experienced.
The liberal power structure is preserving itself off the backs (quite literally) of girls and young women. This cannot go on.
Vive la révolution.
Long live the revolution.
You can read about Thaïs case and donate to her here:
https://www.patreon.com/cw/ThaisdEscufon
As you say, we all know white men can be a threat BUT if a white woman reports assault by a white man, authorities BELIEVE AND PURSUE. If the assailant is a “disadvantaged minority” or immigrant, the belief goes out the window and the victim becomes the villain. That is why stories like you recount are so important to shove in people’s faces. This is our reality!
You are brave and strong and still fighting, maybe harder than ever.
A special place in hell awaits that female Parisian prosecutor. Prosecuting the victims of crime, rather than the perpetrators - she is a coward in so many ways. But selling your soul, as she has, requires the deepest cowardice.
Vive la révolution