If you work as a reporter for 40 years, and spend part of that time in the courts, you tend to come across a lot of unpleasant characters.
Rapists come in many shapes and sizes, and it goes without saying that some rapes are significantly nastier than others, but it is probably not unfair to say anyone who forces himself sexually on someone else passes the unpleasantness test with ease.
Rapists who also kill or maim, serial rapists and the rapists of children are the worst of the lot, though any jump-out-of-the-bush rapist or burglar-come-rapist is not far behind.
In the early 1980s, I covered the trial of the Cambridge Rapist back in the 1970s, and the cases of the M5 rapist and, almost beyond belief, the raping Anglican priest of South Wales.
While living in the West Country, I became friendly with the inconsolable parents and partner of a student murdered by a would-be rapist in Devon. Back in London, I watched a gynaecologist jailed for administering Rohypnol to patients and reported on a couple of "date rape" trials. And later I organised coverage by others of major rape cases.
Looking at most of the accused in the crimes listed above, but taking care to exclude the students who were acquitted in the date rape cases, it is easy to think of Aldo Bosi as less evil.
But he is still evil, having admitted in a French court a few days ago to creeping into a British holidaymaker's mobile home, on a campsite in the Var, and raping her while her husband slept in the next room. Fortunately, the young woman retained enough composure to give security guards a good description and Bosi was quickly picked up.
Eventually, after a long period of denial during which he admitted entering the mobile home to rob but insisted that he had not sexually molested the woman, he accepted the rather conclusive nature of the DNA evidence. And after a short trial, he went to jail for seven years, to be followed by a period of supervision,
I suppose it was a fair sentence. Yet he could have got 15 years and, taking account of time served awaiting trial, will be out a lot sooner than 2017. His lawyer made something of the fact that no additional violence was used during the assault, and the accused himself claimed, belatedly, to remember nothing of the incident because he had been under the influence of alcohol and drugs.
But what did strike me as being an aggravating feature was the effect on his prey.
This woman had been visiting the same site for 20 years, in other words since she was just into her teens. She clearly loved the area and France. But, her lawyer, Me Coline Martin, told me, she was not present to see her attacker face justice in Draguignan; two years on from the rape, she has yet to set foot again in France. Her husband was in court to make the victim statement on her behalf.
It was said in court that Bosi stole her intimacy just as he snatched her watch, camera and mobile phone and somehow regarded all four items in the same light: other people's possessions to be stolen.
But if Me Martin is right, and I am sure she is, he also stole her love of France, perhaps for the foreseeable future unless the trial comes to mark a turning point for her. It was not the worst thing her attacker did that night, but it certainly adds to the unpleasantness of his actions. Let us hope that in time, his victim chooses to give France another chance.
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