A French man in his fifties was sentenced on Wednesday May 4 to 15 years of criminal imprisonment by the judicial court of Tours (Indre-et-Loire) for having raped a young girl in the Philippines between 2015 and 2017, then shared the videos on the internet. He is also the subject of socio-judicial monitoring for six years, as well as a permanent ban on carrying out an activity in contact with minors.
The accused, who had settled in the Philippines, had been spotted by a cyber-patrolman from the Lyon Regional Judicial Police Service on a pedophile forum, after the broadcast of at least 14 child pornography videos. He had been arrested during a return to France in 2017, and indicted for “rape of a minor under the age of 15”, “possession and dissemination of child pornography images” and “participation in a criminal association with a view to preparation for a crime”.
Another man sentenced for proposing his granddaughters
The victim, a 9-year-old girl at the time, had been forced into prostitution by her uncle, who was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Philippine courts. The jurors did not fully follow the requisitions of the public prosecutor, who had notably demanded 18 years’ imprisonment, but they also did not accept the defense of the accused, who had refuted the notion of rape and spoke of “use of prostitution of a minor”punishable by seven years’ imprisonment. “Can she really consent to this?”was indignant the Advocate General, Alexandre Kling. “The reality is that she is afraid. Fear is not consent.”
In another part of the trial, the 50-year-old told the undercover police officer that he planned to abuse two young girls aged 5 and 8, on the initiative of the mother of the two children. Except that this “mom” was actually just another man, 58 years old. Passing himself off as his wife, he offered to make his granddaughters available to potential rapists. An appointment had been made when the restorer returned to France. The two men declared that they had never intended to materialize this “plan 58”, evoking a “fantasy”, “a delirium”. The second defendant was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, without a warrant.