seven years in prison for a leisure center manager in Toulouse

This sentence is accompanied in particular by five years of socio-judicial monitoring, an obligation of care and a ban on any contact with the victims. The prosecutor's representative had asked for the maximum penalty, which is ten years in prison.

The 29-year-old defendant was suspected of sexually assaulting eight children between 2016 and 2023, two of whom have not been identified, and of photographing or filming nearly 70 of them, naked, in two preschools in Toulouse and the third in Saint-Jean, not far from the Pink City, where he worked as an animator.

In this two-day closed-door trial with a “heavy atmosphere”, according to the lawyer of two victims, Me Guedj Benayoum, the defendant admitted the facts, mostly answering only “briefly” to questions, according to another lawyer, Me. Malika Chmani.

The former hostess, “relieved that the process is being carried out to apologize to her families”, “did not know” the facts she was committing, her lawyer, Me Ferdinand Djammen Nzepa, said on Thursday. “When I explained to him that it is forbidden to photograph naked children, he understood,” he said.

“As soon as we arrested him, he knew he had done things that were not good for children, for families,” he said. On Friday evening he clarified that he does not intend to appeal.

First report

The man was arrested on July 17, 2023. Two days later, he was charged with “retaining, recording and exporting images of a minor of a child pornographic nature”, as well as sexual assault, and placed in pretrial detention.

The images being stored on the defendant's Google Drive, it was the American company that had reported them about a month ago to the Central Office for the Suppression of Violence against Persons (OCRVP). Some of the 82 videos found on his phone, shot between 2021 and 2023, showed children undressing.

According to the prosecutor's office, one of them showed the host “passing a napkin insistently over the penis of a child”, while in another he “beat the penis over the panties” of another young victim, elements that characterize sexual aggression.

Almost 200 photographs of children aged four to eight taken at schools or leisure centers were also found on the phone of the presenter who, during his custody, mentioned an “unhealthy arousal of danger and forbidden sexual attraction, but not ” justifies his actions.

A first report involving the host was made in 2016 by the parents of a five-year-old girl who reported “kisses on the mouth” from the host. The procedure was rejected by the courts for “insufficiently characterized crime”.