Horrified farmer ‘catches teenager raping her goats’ after noticing poor animal tied up

WARNING, GRAPHIC CONTENT: A 19-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of perpetrating a series of sick attacks on female goats – but despite DNA evidence tying him to the crime, he has protested his innocence

A farm owner says she’s barely slept in the past two months after discovering that a mysterious intruder has been sexually assaulting her goats. Cassandra Sortino says she first became aware of the sick attacks on February 11, when she noticed that one of the animals had rope around its leg as if it had been tied up.

“I thought someone must have stolen her and that she’d escaped and come back,” Cassandra, who runs a farm in southern France, said.

But over the following weeks, Cassandra found that more of her animals had been tied up overnight. There was evidence of a twisted sexual motive, with the poor animals found with gruesome injuries.

“I thought to myself that something was wrong and that the injuries couldn’t have been caused by male goats,” Cassandra told France 3. Cassandra documented every one of these disturbing incidents, and had all of the abused animals checked over by the local vet.

She decided to set up a CCTV in a hope of catching the culprit in the act. “We wanted to see if it was someone we knew,” Cassandra said. “We had so many questions, but no answers. We wondered if we were going mad… It’s not something that happens every day.”

The predator didn’t return to the farm for three weeks, during which time Cassandra and her daughter remained on high alert. The next attack came on March 20. “He attacked the little ewe again and injured her badly; her life was in danger,” Cassandra claimed.

CCTV recordings showed that the goats were definitely being attacked by a man. “You can see from the video that it’s someone, and this time, we can no longer deny it,” Cassandra said. “It’s as if he could watch us. He changed his approach each time, always hiding from the camera. He shows that he’s there, but during the act, he’s always hidden.”

After weeks of checking the farm’s CCTV records, finally on April 9 the culprit was caught in the act. After spotting the man in her security camera Cassandra called the police at around 10.30 pm and officers raced to the scene.

She recalled: ”At 10.30pm, we can see from the video that he’s there. We called the BAC (Anti-Crime Brigade). My partner went up with them, and I went round the hillside with the dogs to make sure he didn’t get away.”

The suspect was apprehended in the farm’s goat enclosure but still insisted to arresting officers that he was innocent, adding that he was “crazy.”

In total, six animals were raped, some of them on multiple occasions. Five complaints have been filed, notably by France’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPA), which has joined the proceedings as a civil party.

The public prosecutor’s office in Aix-en-Provence has confirmed that the individual was indeed “caught in the act” and that there is “a match with the DNA samples taken during the investigation.”

Under the Criminal Code, sexual offences against a domestic, tame or captive animal are punishable by three years’ imprisonment and a fine of €45,000.