The duo of YouTubers Vilbrequin. Screenshot / YouTube.
This decision comes ten days after the announcement of the end of their channel which has nearly 2.5 million subscribers.
Two videographers running the Vilbrequin YouTube channel were fined 3,000 euros each on Monday evening by the Charleville-Mézières court for using rifles and pistols during the filming of one of their videos. The prosecution had requested six months of suspended imprisonment and a fine of 500 euros, emphasizing that “this type of video and YouTubers are of particular interest to young people and adolescents in construction”, demanding of them “setting an example towards their audience“.
This decision comes ten days after the announcement of the end of Vilebrequin, the first automotive channel on YouTube in France with nearly 2.5 million subscribers, by the duo who explained that they wanted to take a breather after seven years of weekly production. Pierre Chabrier, 29, and Sylvain Lévy, 30, were prosecuted for illegally carrying weapons, alongside a 25-year-old customs officer who had provided them with the weapons.
“Exploding a car by shooting the tank: is it possible?”
The latter, the only one present in the courtroom on Monday, was sentenced to a fine of 2,000 euros and the confiscation of the weapons concerned. The facts date back to October 15, 2022 during the filming of a video of around twenty minutes entitled “Exploding a car by shooting the fuel tank: is it possible?“. We see the two videographers, renowned for their offbeat automobile tests, firing live ammunition at two cars destined for scrapping, in the countryside, on private land located in Belleville-et-Chatillon-sur-Bar (Ardennes).
Ten firearms, four pistols and six rifles, were used. The three men had already filmed a first video two years earlier, where an armored car had been targeted, but this had taken place in a shooting gallery. The prosecution emphasized that the accomplice of the YouTubers “had no legitimacy to organize this shooting session and lend his weapons“.
“My clients had the feeling that everything was lined up”
By relying on him, “my clients had the feeling that everything was lined up», argued the lawyer for the Vilbrequin YouTubers, Me Arnaud Pelpel. During the filming of the video, “the police came, took selfies with them“, he argued. As for exemplarity, in the video, the duo repeats around fifteen times “definitely don’t do it again“, he recalled, pleading for release.
The lawyer for their co-defendant, Me David Meunier, also called for the acquittal. “It is the meeting between two worlds that he likes, the world of weapons and the world of YouTubers, of glitter, which generates this situation“, he estimated. His client, who was a firefighter, then a police officer before becoming a customs officer, “did not deliberately cross a barrier“.