He had sexually assaulted underage students and had taken photos and videos of dozens of naked children. A former leisure centre facilitator in Toulouse was sentenced on Friday to seven years in prison, a sentence accompanied by five years of socio-judicial monitoring, an obligation to receive treatment and a ban on any contact with the victims.
The defendant, 29, was suspected of having sexually assaulted eight children between 2016 and 2023, two of whom have not been identified, as well as having photographed or filmed nearly 70 of them, naked. The events took place in two nursery schools in Toulouse and a third in Saint-Jean, not far from the Ville Rose, where he worked as a group leader.
Apologies to families
In this two-day trial behind closed doors with a “heavy atmosphere”, according to the lawyer of two victims, Me Guedj Benayoum, the defendant admitted the facts, most often only responding “briefly” to questions, according to another lawyer, Me Malika Chmani.
The former presenter, “relieved that the trial is taking place to apologize to the families,” was “not aware” of the acts he was committing, his lawyer, Ferdinand Djammen Nzepa, said on Thursday. “When we explained to him that it was forbidden to take photos of naked children, he understood,” he stressed.
“As soon as he was arrested, he knew that he had done things that were not good for children, for families,” he said. On Friday evening, he said he was not considering appealing, even though the prosecutor’s office had requested the maximum sentence, ten years in prison.
Children filmed undressing
The man was arrested on July 17, 2023. Two days later, he was charged with “possession, recording and export of child pornography images of a minor,” as well as sexual assault, and placed in pretrial detention.
As the images were stored on the defendant’s Google Drive, it was the American company that had reported them about a month earlier to the Central Office for the Repression of Violence against Persons (OCRVP).
Some of the 82 videos found on his phone, filmed between 2021 and 2023, showed children undressing. According to the prosecution, one of them showed the host “insistently passing a wipe over the genitals of a child” while in another he “pat the genitals over the panties” of another young victim, elements characterizing sexual assault.
An “unhealthy excitement of danger”
Nearly 200 photos of children aged four to eight, taken in schools or leisure centres, were also found on the phone of the facilitator who, during his police custody, had mentioned an “unhealthy excitement of danger and prohibition but not sexual attraction” to justify his actions.
“We think we can trust education and, in fact, we realize that even within the confines of an establishment, we cannot trust, we have to remain vigilant,” said Sophie, mother of one of the victims, on condition of anonymity.