(Paris) French cellist Jérôme Pernoo was sentenced Tuesday in Paris to a one-year suspended prison sentence for sexual assault on a former student aged 14 at the time of the facts, in 2005.
In May, the prosecution requested two years in prison, including one suspended sentence, against the 51-year-old musician, a former professor at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris (CNSMDP).
The sentence handed down by the Paris criminal court is accompanied by a ban on carrying out, for ten years, any voluntary or professional activity with minors.
The name of the convicted person was entered in the File of perpetrators of sexual or violent offenses (Fijais).
Jérôme Pernoo was found guilty of sexual assault on a former student who was 14 years old at the time of the events, in 2005, in London.
The latter had claimed that the teacher had “stroked his penis by surprise while he was asleep in his bed”.
The student, now 32 years old, had followed courses led by the man he considered his “surrogate father”, having lost his father at a very young age.
The defendant was ordered to pay him 6,070 euros ($8,665) for material damage and 5,000 euros ($7,140) for moral damage.
A teacher at the CNSMDP since 2007, Jérôme Pernoo was suspended then dismissed without notice or compensation by the Parisian establishment in May 2022, following an administrative investigation and a disciplinary procedure.
The dismissal was confirmed in November by the Paris administrative court. The teacher appealed this sanction.