The Exorcists: Four on trial in France for religion inspired kidnap and torture

A group of former members of a US-based protestant church, the Seventh Day Adventist, are on trial in France for torturing a 19-year-old woman while attempting to exorcise “the devil” out of her in shockingly-violent style.

The trial of three men and a woman, all of French Caribbean
origin, kicked off on Monday, with the group being charged with
kidnapping, acts of torture and barbarism, reports AFP.

They are accused of tying up the young Cameroonian woman,
Antoinette, in the position of Jesus Christ on the cross and
keeping her bound to a mattress for a week.

The four, including her former boyfriend Eric Daeron, were
confident that the teenager’s body had been possessed by the
devil. According to defendants, Antoinette jumped on Daeron
mumbling something incomprehensible. After the attack – which
they believed was a proof of her being possessed by evil - they
decided to try an exorcism.

When police found Antoinette in Grigny, a southern Paris suburb,
she was dehydrated, emaciated and showed signs of having been
beaten. The woman later told investigators that her captors fed
her small amounts of oil and gave her water just to keep her
alive.

The defendants deny using violence against the victim and claim
that she agreed to the exorcism.

“To them, she was possessed, that is why they did not call a
doctor. You call a doctor when someone is sick, when someone is
possessed you exorcise them,” their lawyer, Jacques Bourdais,
told AFP.

The victim and alleged assailants met in 2011 at a Seventh Day
Adventists church, which has millions of followers worldwide and
13,000 in France. The church said all the people involved in the
case were expelled a year before the alleged attack, underlining
that that it in no way condones that kind of exorcism.

Exorcisms are still not uncommon in Europe, including in France.

Last month, blood-curdling screams woke neighbors in the middle
of the night in a quiet area of Limoux, South France. Locals
alleged that a woman was being murdered, but when police arrived
they found out that a bizarre exorcism ritual was being held in
an evangelical church where a pastor was trying to release a
member of the congregation from demonic possession, media
reported.

In March this year, an 8-year-old boy of Cameroonian origin was
abandoned by his father and aunt to die in a hotel car park in
Yvelines after they carried out exorcism on him, believing the
child was possessed by “evil spirits.”