Following an investigation opened in 2020, the YouTuber was sentenced to two years in prison. He is also prohibited from coming into contact with the victims for three years and he can no longer practice a profession in contact with minors.
Youtuber ExperimentBoy, prosecuted for corruption of minors, was sentenced to two years in prison on Tuesday by the criminal court of Val-de-Briey (Meurthe-et-Moselle).
This sentence was accompanied by a ban on contact with the victims for three years and a permanent ban on practicing a profession in contact with minors.
Convicted absent
The sentence is higher than that proposed at the hearing on September 17 by the public prosecutor, who had requested a 10-month suspended prison sentence against the man with more than a million subscribers on his YouTube channel, after four years of investigation.
The YouTuber, whose real name is Baptiste Mortier-Dumont, now 30 years old, was not present when the deliberations were announced on Tuesday, nor at the hearing last month. He was referred to the Briey court in September for corruption of six minors, two of whom were under 15 at the time of the events. The alleged acts extend from February 2016 to June 2018.
The investigation was opened against him in June 2020 at the Lyon public prosecutor’s office. It was then taken over by the Val-de-Briey public prosecutor’s office, the defendant having moved to the east of France.
Abuse of notoriety
Originally, a collective report file had been sent to the Lyon prosecutor and two complaints had been filed for acts of corruption of minors. One of the complainants, and a civil party in the case, had published a testimony under the hashtag “JeSuisVictime” in March 2020 on Twitter, since renamed X.
He denounced the fact that a “fairly well-known YouTuber” had approached him three years previously on Twitter. “He used his notoriety to use me as a remote sex slave. I was 13 years old, without being able to consent to such a thing, and I would have liked to start my sex life differently,” he continued.
According to an investigation by the Numerama website, the Youtuber would have targeted at least ten of his fans. Five victims were under the age of 15 when he allegedly first sent them invitations to exchange sexual photos or proposals for simultaneous masturbation.
ExperimentBoy became known in 2012, publishing dozens of videos showing him carrying out wacky and spectacular scientific experiments inspired by the Anglo-Saxon television program “MythBusters”. His YouTube channel was demonetized in 2020, and he hasn’t posted a video to that account in four years.
