Gaël Perdriau sentenced on appeal to five years in prison for intimate video blackmail

The Lyon Court of Appeal delivered its judgment this Thursday: the former mayor of Saint-Étienne Gaël Perdriau was sentenced to five years in prison, one of which was suspended, on appeal Thursday in Lyon, for blackmail with an intimate video aimed at muzzling his first deputy. The sentence, accompanied by a committal warrant, is the same as that handed down at first instance, with the exception of the period of ineligibility increased to ten years compared to five years previously. However, it is higher than the requisitions (five years, three of which are closed).

During his first trial in 2025, the judges considered him to be the mastermind of a trap aimed at muzzling his first deputy Gilles Artigues, filmed without his knowledge in January 2015 in a hotel room in Paris in the company of a prostitute. The alliance with this centrist elected official, well established locally, had enabled the election as mayor of Gaël Perdriau in 2014, but Gilles Artigues began to distance himself.

Gaël Perdriau, 54, has always fiercely denied being at the initiative of the video, revealed by Mediapart only in 2022. He assures that this “sexual kompromat” was set up without his knowledge by three of his close collaborators at the time.

Gaël Perdriau reaffirmed in June that he had become aware of the video in 2015

Also sentenced to prison at first instance, the three admit to having recruited the escort boy and organized this “barbouzerie”, but at the request of the mayor according to them. During his appeal trial in June, Gaël Perdriau reaffirmed that he had become aware of the video in 2015, while thinking that it was a film made between “consenting adults”.

In 2018, he did threaten his deputy to disclose it in a conversation recorded without his knowledge by Gilles Artigues, but only out of an “outburst of anger” and without demanding anything in return, he still maintained. His lawyer Jean-Félix Luciani therefore pleaded for the court to judge him no longer for “blackmail” but for “threat”, an offense punishable less severely.