How an LSU Law professor came to regret letter defending French student after rape arrest - The Advocate
More than two years after writing a letter vouching for a fellow Frenchman on LSU’s campus, an LSU Law professor says he regrets defending the former graduate student who fled to France last year amid a flurry of sexual misconduct complaints, including rape charges in Rapides Parish.
LSU Law Professor Olivier Moréteau signed a character witness letter Aug. 21, 2019, on behalf of Edouard d’Espalungue d’Arros and sent it to his defense attorney. The French Studies graduate student had been arrested about a year earlier, in September 2018, after a University of Louisiana at Lafayette student told police d’Espalungue raped her while the two were attending a religious retreat in Alexandria.
The letter, written on LSU stationery and obtained through a public records request, outlines the efforts some LSU officials made to defend d’Espalungue's between 2018 and 2020, despite warnings that he was a sexual predator roaming campus. The university is facing a federal lawsuit over how LSU officials handled six women’s complaints about d’Espalungue’s behavior, including multiple complaints of rape.
But the letter is the first evidence that a university official had gone to bat for him in his criminal case. The document raised serious questions about whether the UL student was telling the truth.
“It quickly became obvious, talking to him and later meeting his family, that this young man was trapped in an unbelievable story, and that he needed not only strong legal assistance (I helped identify the best possible attorney to defend his case), but also human support from a fellow countryman (I am a French citizen, permanent resident of the United States),” his letter states.
Reached for this story, Moréteau said he wrote the letter in good faith in 2019 after d’Espalungue showed him police body camera footage from the night in question that “there was nothing suggesting violence.” After a year went by without the Rapides Parish District Attorney’s office charging or a grand jury indicting d’Espalungue, Moréteau said he believed that the case was weak.
But the woman who reported d’Espalungue has also raised concerns about how prosecutors handled her case. Rather than simply charge d’Espalungue, the DA’s Office repeatedly rescheduled grand jury proceedings in which they asked her to testify. In interviews, she said that after she and d’Espalungue hung out at the retreat, he tackled her, pinned her to the ground and forced himself upon her. She said a Rapides Parish sheriff’s deputy talked her out of receiving a rape exam, and that when she laughed while reporting the crime — a common trauma response — he took her report less seriously.
She eventually testified before a grand jury about the case this year, and it indicted d’Espalungue on third-degree rape.
But Moréteau said that he did not have that knowledge when he wrote the letter. Instead, he said he believed that d’Espalungue had acted inelegantly, but that he believed the case stemmed from consensual sex that the woman later regretted, especially given that it happened on a religious retreat.
“As a law professor I am mindful of the presumption of innocence,” he said in response to questions for this story. “Also, as a foreigner myself, I was anxious that Edouard’s awkward communication — he is not a native speaker — in a hostile setting would play against him. In emotional adverse circumstances, non-native speakers are at a clear disadvantage, and cultural differences are all too often overlooked.”
When Moréteau emailed his letter to LSU’s former French Department Chair Adelaide Russo in 2019, Russo wrote back that she was also contemplating submitting a letter of support for d’Espalungue. It’s unclear whether Russo ever followed through, though she drafted such a letter in the text of an email to Moréteau.
She, too, questioned the legitimacy of the rape case against her student and research assistant.
“As someone who has lived in several countries and is very aware of the nuances of cultural conventions, it was obvious to me that his unfortunate incident was the result of a misinterpretation of cultural codes,” Russo wrote. “His account of the incident from the very beginning convinced me of his innocence.”
Russo, whom LSU recently removed as chair of the French Studies department, referred questions for this story to her attorney, who she said would contact The Advocate. The attorney has not followed up.
Attorneys Mimi Methvin and Elwood Stevens, who are representing the six women suing LSU over d’Espalungue’s case, said the emails between Moréteau and Russo show a troubling culture at LSU.
“It’s disturbing that at the same time LSU was turning a deaf ear to complaints about d’Espalungue’s harassment and endangerment of female LSU students, two powerful LSU professors were putting their thumbs on the scale to get criminal charges against him dismissed in Rapides Parish,” they said in a statement. “It’s the same old story: predators are protected and victims are discounted and ignored.”
“People ask, ‘How does this happen at LSU?’” they added. “This is how it happens.”
An LSU spokesperson declined to answer questions for this story.
In their 2019 correspondence, Moréteau and Russo described d’Espalungue as a conscientious and hard-working student. Moréteau praised his work creating the American Journal for French Studies, describing d’Espalungue as passionate, energetic and a “peoples’ person, socializing well with students and professors alike.” He wrote that he met once a week with d’Espalungue as they developed a friendship. He described trying to mentor the French student as he adjusted to American norms.
They became close enough that Moréteau visited and befriended d’Espalungue’s family in Paris; they returned the favor in Baton Rouge. Moréteau said the family was “close-knit, well to do, highly educated and sophisticated.”
But as more allegations against d’Espalungue came to light, Moréteau said, his views changed.
In September 2020, an LSU student filed a complaint against d’Espalungue with the university, saying he had raped her after taking her on a picnic.
Moréteau said he was shocked to learn of the new allegation, but that d’Espalungue showed him text messages that again made him believe the student regretted having consensual sex with him once she found out he had been arrested in the Alexandria rape case.
“I told him he needed legal help and worried about his psychology,” Moréteau said. “I was upset at his having such random affairs with women he did not know given his delicate situation and not acting as a gentleman. I realized then that he had the behavior of a predator and became suspicious.”
By that point, Moréteau said he was no longer willing to defend d’Espalungue.
“I believed what I wrote when I wrote the letter, and did it in good faith,” Moréteau said. “I would not write this letter again and would not have written it past the September 2020 incident. Also, I feel sorry for the victims who feel under protected and my help would go to them if in a position to help.”
Moréteau is not a defendant in the lawsuit alleging that LSU officials broke federal Title IX laws that prohibit gender-based discrimination by not thoroughly investigating complaints against d’Espalungue. Russo is a defendant in the lawsuit.
In her 2019 emails, Russo described the rape arrest as an “unfortunate episode,” saying it caused a breakdown of a previously collegial and collaborative environment among those working in LSU’s Department of French Studies. She wrote that she hoped the criminal case would finish soon so that they could move forward.
“There are those who do not understand that Edouard has never been charged for this alleged offense,” Russo wrote at the time.
One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against LSU, a faculty member described as Jane Doe 6, alleged that Russo repeatedly told her French Department colleagues that d’Espalungue was innocent.
LSU suspended d’Espalungue for a year in November 2020 after the September 2020 report of rape. LSU’s Office of Student Advocacy and Accountability determined that d’Espalungue had violated the university’s sexual misconduct and endangerment policies.
But shortly after his suspension, d’Espalungue petitioned the judge handling his rape case in Rapides Parish to let him travel back to France for Christmas 2020. The Rapides Parish District Attorney’s Office did not object. The judge, Chris Hazel, agreed that d’Espalungue could go home for the holidays.
D’Espalungue has never returned. France does not extradite its own citizens when they are accused of crimes abroad.
By then, Moréteau said they were no longer as close.
“I took distance from that time, and he left to France,” Moréteau said, adding that he tried to help convince D’Espalungue to stop advertising the American Journal of French Studies as an LSU project. “He was out of control. I eventually asked him to stop all communication, him and his family and so it was since April 2021.”
The emails also show that Russo was involved in January when LSU’s Humanities and Social Sciences Dean Troy Blanchard asked that d’Espalungue remove references to LSU on the American Journal of French Studies’ website. Russo responded that she’d been in touch with d’Espalungue and that the journal was not a departmental publication. In one email included in the exchange, d’Espalungue shared his personal email address with Russo and thanked her.
D’Espalungue wrote on a publicly available resume that he’d received a $40,000 LSU Grant, and funding from the New Orleans Consulate for the journal. Russo, however, wrote in an email to Blanchard that “he never received funds for the department for the publication, although he may have received some funds from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New Orleans and donations from individual members of the faculty.”
After a Rapides Parish grand jury convened in February — after d’Espalungue left for France — and charged him with third-degree rape in the case involving the UL-Lafayette student, Hazel revoked his bond and issued a bench warrant for him.
source: https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/article_f2e05204-61c7-11ec-9cdb-2f9a37e19567.html
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