Man cuts off love rival's penis
Blaise Fragione, in court today, says he just “lost it” after his partner’s lover announced he was sleeping with her
A MAN is in court in Aix-en-Provence after he cut off his love rival’s penis with a stanley knife.
According to the defendant, Blaise Fragione, 38, his rival came to his home in Marseille around 22.00 in October 2008, and declared, pointing to the relevant body part “I’m with your wife, it’s me who’s touching her. If you’re not happy with that, it’s tough”.
He said he then knocked out the man with a punch, removed his trousers, cut off his penis and threw it in the toilet.
He said: “It was chaos in my head. On that day when he came to my home to announce all that to me; it was like everything disconnected. I was living a waking nightmare.”
He said it was because his life was built around his relationship with his partner of 14 years and their two children. “Everything that I had refused to believe, everything came back to the surface and I just lost it”.
However the victim, 36, gave a different story – he said Fragione threatened him with a weapon and forced him to follow him to his home where he tied him up with electric cables before mutilating him. This version has however not been accepted by judges in the case.
Fragione called the emergency services while, he said, his rival was lying in a corner, putting pressure on the wound. After they had come he cleaned up the blood because his children were due home and wrote a note apologising and saying he would be away for a long time.
The lawyer for the lover, Grégoire Ladouri, said however the act looked more like revenge than a moment of madness. “He wanted the punishment to fit the crime”, he said, calling the attack “as brutal as it was unexpected”.
The man has been left hoping for reconstructive surgery, likely to be difficult and with uncertain results.
“My life’s dead; it’s worse than if I’d been killed,” he told the court.
There have been three other legal cases of penis cutting in Marseille in the last 50 years, two of which were people who removed their own while suffering mental illness.
A verdict is expected today.
