Valencia court tries Nazi paedophile for sexual assault on two underage boys

"He was like a father to me," said one of the two victims of alleged sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of far-right German Jessie Marsson before the court in Valencia.

The provincial court is currently holding the trial against Marsson. That's not his real name, but one of the many identities he used to avoid detection and prevent his criminal record from being traced online.

The assaults allegedly happened in the Canal de Navarrés area in Valencia province. Despite his criminal record for child pornography in Germany, he had organised a "help and rescue" programme in Valencia to take children out of paedophile rings.

"He didn't seem like a bad person," the other boy said. He's still only 14 years old. His age made him an easy target for the defendant.

A friend of the defendant testified on the first day of the trial and offered an explanation for the use of that pseudonym. According to him, the defendant had used the pseudonym Jessie Marsson to write a book about disturbing cases of violent assault and protect his 85-year-old mother from the impact. The witness said that the scenes in the book could make a person "vomit".

The two victims testified during the second day of the trial. The two boys, who were just 14 and 12 years old when they allegedly suffered the sexual abuse (the former repeatedly and with penetration), detailed via videoconference the nightmare they had experienced during their time in Canal de Navarrés.

For the younger boy, it was an isolated incident that never happened again, but he remembers it clearly. "He took me to buy sweets," the boy said.

On one of those occasions, the boy refused the offer. "He put a sweet in my mouth and touched me inappropriately," the boy said. The defendant then pulled down his pants and underwear and groped him

"If you tell your mother, I'll hurt her," the man said, according to the boy's account. The victim saw a knife in the room where they were. That's why he kept quiet until he learnt of the other case.

The other boy said that he had experienced continuous abuse for almost a year.

The events date back to February 2022, when he came to Spain because he was having serious problems at school. He was told about a "project for young people" in the Valencia town.

He first stayed in a holiday home with a woman who had received specific training in working with troubled youth and who introduced him to the defendant.

For the first two or three months, the boy lived in a motorhome on Jessie's plot of land, before the accused later gave him another one. The victim said that the defendant bought him gifts including clothes, a mobile phone, a guitar and even a dog in September 2022.

"He knew having a dog meant a lot to me," the boy said.

A few months after arriving in Spain, the sexual assaults began, although the boy could not give an exact date because everything happened gradually. "It started with caresses, hugs, then he began touching me more," he said.

He would go to sleep in the defendant's motorhome and they would lay down together, at first fully clothed. "Sometimes he came very close, but I thought it was normal. For me he was like a father," the boy said.

These touches escalated into mutual masturbation, oral sex and penetration, acts to which a 14‑year‑old cannot legally consent, especially when the perpetrator is three times his age.

The boy also identified distinctive features of the defendant's penis and a scar in the groin area, which strengthen the credibility of his account. He said the man had a hole in the glans, which the defendant claimed came from a nail.

One of the pieces of evidence in the case consists of Telegram messages the defendant and the boy exchanged in the spring of 2024. In them, the defendant appears to acknowledge sexual acts after the teenager confronts him: "Do you want to deny that your penis, several centimetres, was in my arse several times?" reads one message, translated from German with the help of an interpreter.

"I did everything to protect you from them and from yourself. I did everything to help you," the defendant writes. "I made mistakes, very important and serious ones, and you know I've learnt the consequences."

The defence states that the victim had complete freedom of movement, keys to the motorhome and the property, a bicycle and a mobile phone and could therefore have left or asked for help after the first abuses or later assaults.

The prosecution says that he was a 14‑year‑old boy who believed the defendant would help him overcome the problems he faced at school in Germany. Furthermore, the boy's relationship with his biological father was not good, which is why he saw the defendant as a guardian.

He said that he hadn't told his father earlier "out of shame" and because he "didn't feel comfortable", especially because the defendant had repeatedly told him that his parents didn't love him.

The prosecutor is asking for a 15‑year prison sentence for Frank H. M. B.: nine years for the continuous sexual assault with penetration of the 14‑year‑old and six years for the offences against the second boy, which did not involve penetration.