The 23-year-old man had been sentenced for the first time by the Tarbes court to four years in prison on November 6, 2023, for similar acts against 37 victims.
It is a young man with a face drowned by a ball of hair, introverted and harmless-looking, who appears at the bar of the court, this Tuesday afternoon. However, the facts of which he is accused are very serious, and are of global scale since they concern social networks.
He is accused of threatening nine young girls, eight of whom were minors, to obtain photos and videos of a sexual nature, in France but also in Canada and Switzerland. The 23-year-old had been sentenced for the first time by the Tarbes court to four years in prison on November 6, 2023, for similar acts on 37 victims over a period of more than three years, a sentence that had been confirmed by the Pau Court of Appeal on March 14, 2024.
The modus operandi recalled by the presiding judge is always the same: “You make contact with young girls through social networks, you start to create links and you end up asking them questions about sexuality. As soon as they block you, you switch to threat mode by demanding that they send you photos and videos of themselves, naked.”
The young man thus created pages on pornographic sites, distributing photos and videos of the young girls, their first names, sometimes even their telephone numbers. His blackmail takes the form of threats of rape and crime. For example, when he threatens a 16-year-old girl of Canadian origin “to send someone to rape her and distribute her photos on the dark web” if she does not give in to his blackmail.
“He wanted to pulverize these young girls”
His insults are extremely violent: “You’re dead. Dirty organic waste, with your whore’s body. Suicide.” He confided to one of the young girls “contacted” with whom he had fallen in love, that he “would have liked to see young girls commit suicide live on webcam.” He even asked the brother of one victim to grope her breasts.
“He wanted to take possession of fragile young girls, subjugate them and even pulverize them,” said Chipi, lawyer for one of the victims. Some were destroyed, like one of them who “spent her days in her bed, sleeping, to avoid thinking about what she had suffered” and ended up self-harming, too.
“I lived for ten years in fear of bullying from first grade to final year, on social media. It was to vent my anger and what I suffered in my childhood,” the person in question defends himself. “I was angry at the time. It was just words. I wasn’t myself,” the defendant adds, as if to exonerate himself.
“Emotional coldness”
The psychiatric assessment shows, however, that he has “no empathy”, “an emotional coldness”, “a perverse character” and “a mental imbalance” which is at the origin of “several episodes of self-harm” and “occasional suicidal thoughts”. “He lives in permanent hatred. He must not know what empathy is” charges Mr. Mesa, lawyer for the civil party. But her lawyer sees above all “in this personality which can be disconcerting”, “a youth flouted by problems of harassment”. She thinks that justice “did not try to understand” her client, in a world where it is necessary to “distinguish what is real from what is virtual”. And requests “the confusion of sentences”.
Given “the risk of reoffending”, the public prosecutor requested a four-year prison sentence, without any confusion with the previous sentence. The court finally sentenced the young man to 18 months in prison, with compulsory treatment, by merging the sentence with the four-year prison sentence previously handed down.
