Two French men have been jailed for 25 years for raping an Irish woman in the town of Menton in southeast France.
Pedro Miguel Goncalves Rodrigues and Rafael Rodrigue Torres, both aged 30, were described in court in Nice as “good fathers, good husbands and good workers”. They had no police records.
They were found guilty of “torture and acts of barbarism” against a 35-year-old Irish woman following a three-day trial last week.
The trial heard the woman was raped on the back seat of a car in Menton in September 2016.
The Irish woman was on holiday and met the two men in a bar. Video surveillance footage shows her staggering out of the bar, accompanied by Rodrigues and Torres, who put her into their four-wheel drive vehicle. They drove her to an industrial zone where she was raped.
She was found at 5am, bleeding and wandering alone in the town. She had to undergo emergency surgery. Medical experts told the trial the attackers treated their victim “like a rag doll”.
The prosecutor said the victim ’s life has been irreparably changed and she can no longer work. “Her entire family is broken.”
As a result of her injuries, the victim may suffer permanent incontinence.
The men wanted to have a “bachelor” evening, and were described as “letting off steam,” the court heard.
The victim’s French lawyers accused the rapists of “deliberately making her drink, to make her more vulnerable.
“A woman in that condition, you take care of. You don’t carry her like a bag of cement and dump her on the pavement after sadistic games.”
The Irish woman was accompanied in court by her brother, who became ill when a video shot by the rapists was shown.
Rodrigues and Torres blamed each other for the crime.
The judge in the case, Didier Guissart, cited the men’s “lying, changing and contradictory” version of events when handing down sentence.
The woman sobbed when the verdict was read out.
