Rhône: businessman Thierry Ehrmann sentenced to four months in prison for death threats against a mayor

The iconoclastic businessman and sculptor Thierry Ehrmann was sentenced Thursday to four months in prison for having threatened to kill the mayor of the town near Lyon where his museum is located, the subject of a legal battle for more than 20 years.

The Lyon criminal court went significantly further than the prosecution which had requested a 12-month suspended sentence during the September 21 hearing against Thierry Ehrmann, founder and CEO of Artprice, world leader in the listing of the art market, Arnaud Paturat, the lawyer for the mayor of Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or (Rhône), told AFP on Friday.

Thierry Ehrmann was prosecuted for having launched death threats in September 2025 against Guillaume Malot, councilor of this small, wealthy town in the west of Lyon, a scene filmed in front of a business in the city center in September 2025.

A conflict that has lasted for more than twenty years

Suffering from a neurodegenerative disease which gives him, he explains, “extraordinary creativity and strength”, Thierry Ehrmann created the Abode of Chaos, a private open-air museum made up of more than 6,000 works, almost exclusively his own. Rusty metal sculptures rub shoulders with Dadaist and Situationist manifestos, Chinese ideograms and stenciled cave portraits of artists, leaders, dictators and terrorists. The surrounding walls of this extravagant ensemble are blackened and stained with libertarian portraits and inscriptions. The conflict with the town hall dates back to 2004, when the mayor at the time sued Thierry Ehrmann for non-compliance with the town planning code.

“We welcome this decision, it is important to show that threats against elected officials do not go without criminal response,” responded Arnaud Paturat, adding that the mayor “will now be able to move on.” In a press release, Thierry Ehrmann announced that he was appealing this decision. “The obvious discrepancy” between this decision “and the reality of the documents in the file (...) required a strictly opposite outcome,” according to him.