The word “regrets” was heard only on 9 November 2026, at 6 p.m., before the Paris departmental criminal court. It did not come from one of the defendants: it fell, by proxy, from the lips of Aurélien L.’s partner.
Before turning to the blows and the police report, the court examines the defendants’ backgrounds. The assessment of their personalities therefore opens the hearing, while the only word of regret associated with Aurélien L. comes only late in the afternoon, and even then through the voice of his partner.
The three men are thus presented, at first, through their life paths rather than through the account of the blows. Nothing in these elements of personality entered into the debate immediately matches the image of brutes suggested by the beating with which they are charged.
The prosecution alleges a beating described as savage of this rap producer, followed by the drafting of a falsified police report. At the bar, however, the contrast is striking: none of the three, at first glance, presents the profile of a thick-headed brute that these facts would lead one to expect.
Aurélien L. is one of the three police officers on trial for having beaten music producer Michel Zecler on 21 November 2020, and then for having taken part, with accomplices, in the fabrication of a false police report intended to conceal the facts. The first portrait is that of Pierre P., 37. Suspended from the national police since the events, he receives a partial salary. A personality investigator paints a most laudatory picture of him.
This flattering portrait does not erase what he is accused of: the violence of 21 November 2020 and participation in a falsified police report. On the contrary, it feeds the discrepancy that the hearing brings to light from its very first hours.