An anti-mass migration activist and former spokesperson for the banned Generation Identity movement in France has filed a police report against a North African man who she says broke into her home and sexually assaulted her.
Thaïs d’Escufon, aged 22, had just returned to her home in Lyon after a workout session last week when a North African migrant claiming to be Tunisian forced his way into her house and sexually assaulted her, French daily newspaper Le Figaro reports.
The young activist, who has previously been interviewed by Remix News in June of this year, recounted the attack during an interview with the Paris-based newspaper.
“The man surely stayed behind my back and rushed into the apartment as soon as I turned the key,” she said, adding that he took advantage of the fact that she had been wearing earphones at the time.
“It all happened so fast, he closed the door and took the key that I had put in the lock. I found myself alone with this man, locked up,” d’Escufon continued.
“This is what thousands of French women go through every day. What happened to me is what I denounce and what I’m being censored for,” said d’Escufon.
The activist described the harrowing assault, saying, “He asks me if he has a chance with me, I tell him no. He wants to kiss me, but I struggled. He managed to brush my lips at one point. I begin crying, and I tell him to go. He told me to wait, that he’s going to ask me something, but I’m in a panic, and he holds my wrists. While holding my wrists, he makes me sit on the beanbag by the door, I tell him to go, and he tells me to suck him off. Panicked, I cry even more, I am terrified. He lets go, I jump up, I manage to open the door and push him out, he goes left, and I close it quickly behind me.”
After the assault took place, d’Escufon claimed that the man who had just attacked her said: “I know that in France, you think that all Arabs are evil, I am not like that, I swear before God.” She added that the attacker, before fleeing the scene, picked up his cigarette butts to avoid leaving behind any physical evidence that he had been there.
Later on social media, d’Escufon wrote: “How do I know that he is of Tunisian origin? Because it was he who told me. I stayed with him for half an hour, I inevitably had time to discuss. […] It was he who told me that I had very French features, that I was pretty.”
“I learned my lesson and urge young women to stop listening to music in the street,” she added.
The Lyon prosecutors office has since opened an investigation into the counts of “sexual assault, home invasion, and sexual harassment.”
Although the French government ordered the dissolution of Generation Identity last summer, d’Escufon has remained a prominent anti-mass migration activist and social media influencer in her country’s political scene.
Cases of sexual violence against women in France have been steadily climbing since the migrant crisis of 2015 and 2016. From 2017 to 2018, reports of rape increased by almost 17 percent. The French Interior Ministry statistics service SSMI published a report last year which noted that cases of sexual violence had increased by 12 percent in 2019 compared to the previous year.
“All French regions have experienced increases in the number of rapes, assaults, and sexual harassment recorded by the security forces in 2019, notably Corsica, Centre-Val-de-Loire, Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes, and Nouvelle-Aquitaine,” the report said.
