Rey was born on August 25, 1975 into a middle-class family in Nanterre and was a philosophy student. Audry Maupin was her partner, a student involved in far-left and anarchist circles.
On October 4, 1994 the two of them, armed, held up a vehicle pound at the Porte de Pantin to take weapons from police guards, hijacked a taxi, and were pursued across northern Paris. In the shooting that followed four people died: the taxi driver Amadou Diallo, forty-nine; and three police officers, Thierry Maymard, thirty, Laurent Gerard and a third. Maupin was shot dead by police. The officers who died were Thierry Maymard, thirty, Laurent Gerard, twenty-five, and Guy Jacob, thirty-seven, with the taxi driver Amadou Diallo, forty-nine.
Rey was arrested at the scene. The case was one of the biggest French news stories of the decade, and the coverage fixed on her: a young woman from a comfortable background, photographed with a shaved head, described as an emblem of a disaffected generation. Much of what was written about her politics and her role came from that coverage rather than from evidence.
She was tried in 1998. The court found that Maupin had fired the fatal shots and convicted her of complicity in murder rather than murder, and she was sentenced to twenty years. She was released on May 3, 2009 after fourteen, has lived without publicity since, and has never given an interview.
This is a single incident, not a serial case. It is in the archive because the roster carries it, and the entry records that her conviction was for complicity and that the shots were found to have been fired by a man who died at the scene.