“For him, women are all puppets, we manipulate them and we yell at them” when they don’t cook what he wants, launches at the bar, with a strong and fast word, that was his last companion .
Describing the beatings and “angry impulses” of the man who was convicted of tampering with witnesses against him in March, Anne will stop short for a long moment when his gaze meets that of the accused.
Before her, Isabelle had mentioned her chaotic affair in the summer of 1986 with Jean-Marc Reiser when she met him during a summer job as a letter carrier in Strasbourg. The man quickly becomes insistent, she ends up going out with him “out of weakness and to have peace”.
– “I was lucky” –
“A mistake, because I still don’t have peace,” says Isabelle, very moved. She is going to live an ordeal with the one she describes as “very skilled in manipulation”.
One day when she failed him, preferring to go to the swimming pool with a friend, Jean-Marc Reiser, “in fury”, found her, threw her in his car and drove for miles insulting her: “I feel that the situation is very serious, (…) I am terrified”.
Arriving in a forest, he “throws her to the ground”, “kicks her in the stomach (…) I was afraid that he would strangle me”, she confides, a few meters away. an impassive defendant.
She will end up fleeing with the help of her brother and will leave to settle in Brest, where Reiser will go to harass her before giving up after multiple gifts and fiery letters.
“He didn’t kill me, I was lucky,” breathes the one who says she “was scared for ten years”.
Out of fear, Virginie went out into the street with a knife in her pocket after her one-month adventure with Jean-Marc Reiser in Bastia in 1990, which turned into a nightmare as soon as she wanted to put an end to it.
Of this short relationship, concluded in the harassment and the permanent insults, she still remembers strange remarks of the one who says to imagine himself “like a king to whom we would bring young virgin girls” or shouts without explanation: “They will not find never !”.
“Mr. Reiser you can’t leave him, it has to come from him”, abounds Joëlle, mother of her daughter born in 1992.
“He was going into a spin” and “farted cables”, sometimes for futile reasons, remembers the one who was able to leave him when he was put in prison for the first time in 1997.
She remembers a scene on vacation where, after an argument with the accused’s sister over a candy story, Reiser threw her on a bed and then outside, “armed with a knife”. “He fled when witnesses called the gendarmes,” recalls Joëlle.
“There are things that are false and others that are exaggerated”, challenged Jean-Marc Reiser at the end of a long day of hearing, admitting all the same to having “sometimes reactions that I had to difficult to control”.
“All that is violence on the whole, it’s true, all that is sexual intercourse (described by most as without tenderness, without originality, but without brutality either, editor’s note), it’s true”, has he ended up recognizing.
– “Freak” –
Earlier, Jean-Marc Reiser, very voluble, had complained of having been presented in the media “as a monster” since the start of the affair.
Multiplying the digressions to try to make people forget the portrait of a man described as “alone” and “violent”, the one who ended up recognizing after two and a half years having killed and dismembered Sophie Le Tan also complained of to have been “designated as guilty” upon his arrest, triggering indignant reactions in the room.
Strasbourg student Sophie Le Tan disappeared on her 20th birthday after visiting an apartment north of Strasbourg. The evidence quickly converged on Jean-Marc Reiser, who ended up confessing in early 2021 to having killed and dismembered Sophie but denies having premeditated his act and setting a trap for him.
Relatives of Sophie Le Tan are due to testify on Wednesday. “I hope that we can really honor his memory as it should be,” said his cousin Laurent Tran Van Mang.
