Gaël Perdriau, a member of the establishment Les Républicains party, who has served as the mayor of the French city of Saint-Etienne since 2014, was found guilty of blackmail, criminal conspiracy, and misuse of public funds on Monday, resulting in a four year prison sentence and a year on probation, a fine of €50,000, in addition to an immediate five year ban on holding public office, Le Monde reported.
The mayor was accused of having ordered his political subordinates to film a sex tape of his former deputy, Gilles Artigues, in a hotel with a male prostitute in 2015 to ensure his fealty, pledging to release the tape should Artigues seek to challenge him.
Despite Perdriau maintaining his innocence, and vowing to appeal the conviction, Artigues revealed to the court an audio recording in which the mayor was heard warning him that he had a “USB stick” with the compromising images from the sex tape and threatened to release them publicly.
Artigues said that the threats left him little more than a puppet for the mayor and that he had even considered suicide.
Gilles ARTIGUES answers questions from journalists surrounded by a very large number of cameras and microphones during the deliberation of the trial of the mayor of Saint Etienne Gael PERDRIAU in the Saint Etienne sextape blackmail case at the Criminal Court in Lyon in France on December 1 2025. (Photo by Matthieu Delaty / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images)
In addition to Perdriau, the court also convicted his former chief of staff, Pierre Gauttieri, to two years in prison, and fellow co-conspirators, Samy Kefi-Jérôme and Gilles Rossary-Lenglet, to three years behind bars and a fine of €40,000, Le Figaro reported.
The prosecutor in the case alleged that Gauttieri had run “a mafia-like organization whose top of the pyramid is located in the town hall.”
For his part, Perdriau argued that he never actually had possession of the sex tape and that there were no written records of him instructing the others to film Artigues. In response to the audio tape, his defence team claimed that it merely represented a “threat, but not blackmail”.
In her ruling, Judge Brigitte Verney said: “The court took into account the extreme seriousness of the acts committed, the level of the offences, the conspiracy, and found nothing in the investigation or the proceedings to diminish the extreme gravity of the facts. You possessed the valuable status of an elected official and, as such, a duty of exemplary conduct, dignity, and representation.”
She went on to accuse the mayor of having been the only party involved to have “shown a complete lack of change in his narrative, acknowledgment of the facts, and consideration for the civil parties. He is the only one to deny the obvious. The only one who has not resigned from his elected positions. The only one who can therefore reoffend. He must accept this defence strategy, and it must be taken into account.”
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