Jacques Bouthier: the fall of the insurance magnate targeted by an indictment for rape and human trafficking

The video sequence lasts one minute and nine seconds. We see one of the 500 greatest French fortunes lying on a bed, half naked, wrapped in a pink sheet. Jacques Bouthier caresses the hair of a little girl prostrate on the edge of the mattress. His figure floats in a large white t-shirt. “My name is Fanny* and I am fourteen years old.”

As a wrinkled hand slides through her hair, she is asked: “And have you ever been with a boy?” "No." “Well, we have to start, eh,” replies the insurance magnate. In the room, there is also Aïcha*. “Tell him I’ll give him some money. Two hundred euros, not two hundred dirhams,” insists Jacques Bouthier. Fanny has her eyes glued to the ground. “Poor thing, she looks unhappy,” he slips, before pressing the child’s face against his protruding belly. “Come on, give a hug.”

The man who then runs Assu 2000, one of the main insurance groups in France, does not yet know that the scene was filmed without his knowledge by Aïcha, which will lead to his arrest, then to his fall in the spring of 2022. Four years later, the Paris prosecutor's office requested a trial this summer against the former business manager, in particular for rape and human trafficking.

The investigation uncovered a system of exploitation of minors run by the man who embodied the French “self-made man”. In his debacle...