France: 4 years required against a famous YouTuber and her husband

Five years in prison, four of which are closed, were requested on appeal against the parents of Youtubers Néo and Swann, tried in Lyon for moral harassment and abuse of weakness for their role in a matrimonial enterprise.

Swan and Néo, 12 and 18 years old, have 6.4 million subscribers on their YouTube channel and their mother, Sophie Fantasy, real name Gaëlle Burlot, more than a million subscribers.

For a week, she had been on trial in Lyon for facts prior to her activities on the internet, when she worked for the marriage company Eurochallenges, founded by the mother of her husband Grégory Thonet – alias Greg Inside.

False advertisements, backdated contracts…

At the beginning of the 2010s, several clients of this agency, which promised them to find their soul mate in Asia or Eastern Europe, filed a complaint, denouncing false advertisements, trips billed twice, backdated contracts. ..

At first instance, the couple, tried with other family members and ex-employees, was sentenced to three and a half years’ imprisonment and a fine of 100,000 euros for organized gang fraud, abuse of weakness, moral harassment and concealment of property.

During the appeal trial, Gaëlle Burlot and her husband avoided any responsibility, sometimes with simplistic arguments which may have annoyed the president. “Two neurons do not make a nervous system,” he said.

At the end of the debates, the prosecutor demanded five years of imprisonment, four of which were imposed against them, accompanied by a fine of 50,000 euros each.

“The first incarceration was already very difficult”

Dressed all in black, gone from blonde to brunette and protected by a surgical mask, Ms. Burlot painfully advanced to the bar using a crutch. “I heard the requisitions and obviously I think of my children,” she declared, her voice broken by sobs.

“The first incarceration was already very difficult,” she said, referring to the few weeks spent in prison at the start of the school year. “I hope you don’t destroy my family any more than you already have.”

“I have the impression that +1 Google+ stars parade before this Court,” argued lawyer Romain Profit, counsel for Grégory Thonet, believing that a marriage agency had “an inherently deceptive dimension.”

“We have to look at the side of clumsiness, incompetence, indelicacy” rather than seeing it as a system created to exploit its employees and defraud customers, he argued, pleading for release. The court’s decision was reserved until December 5.