The Tournai public prosecutor’s office on Thursday requested an 8-year prison sentence against a professor who officiated in a college in Comines. The man, now 32, is being prosecuted in a case of grooming, a practice which consists of manipulating a minor to extract intimate photos from him. Between 2015 and the summer of 2018, this professor had created a fake Facebook profile under the identity of a young girl called “Charlotte”. He contacted 400 teenagers and he had sexual exchanges with half of them.
During the hearing on Thursday, the professor appeared free after 8 months of preventive detention under an electronic bracelet. He explained to the court that he began to exchange under his false identity with a single student.
“He was in trouble, I created this fake profile to discuss it with him”, he said on the stand. It was then that things got out of hand when the student in question became attached to the false “Charlotte”. “I felt like I was important at a time when things were going wrong in my private life. If I asked him for photos of a sexual nature, it was to prove to me that I exist”, says the defendant.
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But the man does not stop there. With his fake profile, he repeats the scheme with other young boys, most of them between 14 and 17 years old. A total of 200 will fall into the trap. In some cases, the professor encourages them to insert objects into their anus, which has now earned them the right to be prosecuted for rape.