NORTHAMPTON — A Hampshire Superior Court judge on Wednesday sentenced Mathieu Tebo, 43, of Southampton to 16 to 20 years in prison for crimes stemming from the aggravated rape of three different women, with the survivors of his abuse telling the court about the damage he wrought to their lives.
Tebo, a former mortgage loan officer, was found guilty by a jury last week of 22 of 26 charges, including aggravated rape, kidnapping, strangulation, suffocation, stalking, indecent assault, assault with a dangerous weapon and extortion. The crimes took place over the course of six years between 2016 and 2022. The trial was delayed after Tebo’s original attorney had her license to practice suspended when authorities determined she had misused clients’ fees.
Making sentencing recommendations to Judge James Manitsas in court Wednesday, Assistant District Attorney Sandy Staub, the prosecutor, described Tebo’s modus operandi in targeting the three women. She described Tebo exploiting their vulnerabilities and deploying manipulation to start a romantic relationship before he started to take control over their lives.
“His intent in getting these three women to fall in love with him was to then get their secrets, get things on them, nude photos, lavish money on them and then demand it back,” Staub said. “The ultimate purpose of this pattern and this intent was to degrade and punish each of these women repeatedly.”
All three women were in court during the sentencing to read impact statements to Manitsas to consider when determining sentencing. As a matter of policy, the Gazette does not identify victims of sexual assaults or rape.
The first woman, who was in a relationship with Tebo from 2016 to 2017, said she found it difficult to explain the level of fear she felt when she was with him, saying that he “controlled every aspect” of her life and isolated her from colleagues and family. She said she struggled to trust men at all afterward, and she remained afraid that it could happen to her again.
“He broke me down piece by piece, and made me believe I was to blame and deserved the pain he caused me,” she said. “What he called love was conditional and transactional affection, given only in exchange for control.”
The second woman said that for the past eight years, she lived in a “constant state of vigilance,” unable to be hugged and touched and struggling to trust friends, family and even herself as a result of what Tebo did to her.
“For years, my daily mantra was ‘fake it till you make it,’ because pretending was the only way I knew how to survive,” she said. “I’m still digging through the countless layers of trauma that rape, assault, coercion and psychological abuse inflict on a person’s entire existence. The harm he caused is indescribable in its complexity.”
The third woman, the most recent survivor of Tebo’s abuse, initially struggled to maintain her composure before describing in detail the suffering she endured from him. She said prior to meeting Tebo she already struggled with post-traumatic stress, something Tebo was aware of and used to exploit her further. She described a moment after Tebo had raped her when she sat in the shower in the dark, sitting with her head at her knees.
“When I escaped, every time the water would hit me in the shower, I would have a panic attack. Because all I could think of was that moment when I wanted to die,” she said. “I remember the next day, I couldn’t even pretend to smile. I felt as if he stripped a piece of humanity from me.”
Like Tebo, she also worked in the real estate industry, and she said he had worked to ruin her career after she had left him, and lied to her friends about her. He had also forced her to take out a $10,000 loan for him, and that she was just now making the final payment on it now.
“I lost every friend that I had. It was a hard understanding of what the community actually believed,” she said. “Every second [with Tebo] was a lifetime of trying to find out how I can survive another second.”
Tebo’s attorney, Aliki Recklitis, argued for a lesser sentence of 10 to 15 years, saying her client had no prior criminal record and had himself been a victim of abuse as a child.
“Unlike what the commonwealth views as a kind of innate evilness, the anger and the controlling may well and more likely be a product of him being a victim of sexual and physical abuse,” Recklitis said. “The anger does seem to be a product of the abuse he suffered as a child and the issues of abandonment he has.”
But that argument didn’t sway Manitsas from imposing a steeper sentence of 16 to 20 years, followed by five years probation. The judge recognized the three women for their courage in coming forward and acknowledged the harms they had suffered.
“The punishment must be graduated in proportion to both the offender and the offenses,” he said. “The court also takes into consideration the horrific nature of the offenses and the fact that this case involved multiple acts against three different women occurring over multiple years.”
Tebo will serve his sentence at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, a supermax security prison in Lancaster. While he spent most of the time following his arrest free on bail, he will be given credit for 106 days served in pre-sentencing detention. Following his eventual release, conditions of his probation include undergoing mental health evaluations, undergoing intimate partner violence treatment and registering as a sex offender.