“Simple lies” do not legally characterize a fraud: the Paris criminal court acquitted, on Friday July 10, a 69-year-old faithful who extorted more than €230,000 from elderly priests whom he harassed by mail to appeal to their Christian charity.
“Do you have a heart?” », implored Évariste N. in his flood of handwritten letters to retired clergymen, falsely portraying to them a man in distress, damaged by life and in desperate need of a little financial help to keep his head above water.
Touched by his cause, the men of the Church multiplied the small donations by checks or cash. This is how the justice system accused him of having defrauded €235,330 between June 2019 and December 2025 from around thirty priests, by exploiting the vulnerability of their age or psychological state, when this resident of Val-d’Oise was arrested following a report from the diocese of Paris.
The 13th chamber of the court acquitted him on Friday of the charge of fraud because “the defendant never accompanied his letters with any false invoice, any false order from a bailiff, false hospitalization certificate, nor ever involved a third party in support of these lies” intended for the priests he “targeted”.
Indeed, recalled the court chaired by Guillaume Daïeff, case law “has never considered that the targeting of victims nor the repetition of simple lies characterize fraudulent maneuvers” constituting fraud.
€2,800 per month on average
The training also ruled out a reclassification as abuse of weakness, which requires “serious harm” for the victims, given the small sums donated by each priest individually. The court also acquitted his wife, who was being prosecuted for receiving stolen goods.
According to the people he spoke to, Évariste N. said he was on the verge of being evicted from his home, had had a stroke, had to pay for his son’s funeral, had a daughter who had attempted suicide… All of this was false.
When he was not busy writing his letters of supplication, sometimes simply photocopied from one interlocutor to another, this father of three children spent his time at the bar with friends, spending money that fell from the sky on pints of beer. “I like to have a drink,” he confessed to judges during the trial in June.
In its judgment, the court notes that this former sporting goods salesman, who has not held a salaried job for around twenty years, using this technique ensured an average income of €2,800 per month over the six years of the prevention.
