MORANDINI. Jean-Marc Morandini is tried on Tuesday and Wednesday for the sexual harassment of a young actor and for concealed work. He gave his version of the facts on the first day of the trial.
The judicial soap opera featuring Jean-Marc Morandini continues. This Tuesday, June 13, 2023, his trial for sexual harassment of a young actor and for concealed work opened before the Paris Criminal Court.
It all started with an article by Inrocks published in July 20156 in which Jean-Marc Morandini is accused of having taken advantage of castings to demand that two young actors strip naked or masturbate. “It was to see their limit,” says the host of CNews at the helm today.
During the investigation, the police discovered that the host was hiding under the identity of a fake casting director named Catherine Leclerc, signing “mom”, asking by email for videos of the naked actors masturbating, or asking if they were ready to perform fellatio on Morandini, “who is not just anyone”. “It was a game of seduction”, sweeps Morandini. We are focusing [on fellatio] but we talked about a lot of other things,” replied the defendant.
This first day of trial ended with an unexpected twist: Jean-Marc Morandini claimed that a lawyer “asked him 60,000 euros to ensure that [the complainant named Gabriel] withdraws his complaint”. When asked who the magistrate in question is, the CNews host pointed to Arash Derambarsh, a civil party lawyer who does not defend Gabriel. The lawyer denied this accusation, while Morandini’s lawyer accuses him of “attempted fraud”.
On December 5, 2022, Jean-Marc Morandini was convicted of corruption of minors. The presenter appealed, so he is still presumed innocent. During the first judgment, the Paris Criminal Court sentenced the C News host to one year in prison, suspended probation of 2 years with obligation of care, a sentence consistent with that requested by the prosecutor. In detail, the host was found guilty of having exchanged sexual messages with two teenagers, and of having pushed a third to undress as part of a casting.
Jean-Marc Morandini was tried on October 24, 2022 for “corruption of minors” before the 15th chamber of the Paris court. During the trial, Jean-Marc Morandini had denied en bloc, citing “clumsiness” or attempts at “humor” to justify his messages. The host of CNews, also targeted in another case – that of the castings of the web series Les Faucons -, has long tried to escape this appearance, provoked by two complaints filed in August and September 2016, by two young men who were minors at the time.
On the merits, Jean-Marc Morandini was accused of having made sexual proposals to these two complainants and to a third minor, when they were respectively 15 and 16 years old in 2009 and 2013, by digital means, but also during an encounter presented as a casting. If one of the plaintiffs has since withdrawn his application as a civil party, the prosecution has continued its proceedings against the journalist, which will feed this trial in very raw detail. And the content of the accusation will have destabilized the star of Morandini Live several times who, if she denied any form of corruption of a minor at the helm, regretted “stupid” games of seduction and recognized that these had sometimes been able flatter his ego.
The first young man to have testified against Jean-Marc Morandini received, in February and March 2013, messages of a sexual nature from the presenter on Twitter, after having attended a program and made contact with him via social networks. It is the father of this complainant, alerted by his brother, who will contact the Brigade for the protection of minors. He will explain that he discovered dubious exchanges and even a solicitation from Jean-Marc Morandini, begging his son for a masturbation video. Some of the messages would have circulated in the school of the young man at the time.
The extracts, broadcast in the media, in particular by BFMTV, since the start of the affair were very evocative (“Are you hard there? Mdr” (sic) for example would have asked Jean-Marc Morandini to his interlocutor on March 10, 2013). There was also talk of a “fantasy sexual scenario” offered to the young man, then 15 years old and “fascinated by this figure of television and radio”.
During the trial, other very raw details were revealed about this series of exchanges. After asking “in a somewhat insidious way” what the sexual orientation of the young man was, Jean-Marc Morandini would have notably proposed, still in these messages, “a threesome” with a famous host, or even evoked “a scenario around a fellatio”.
Also present at the bar during the trial, another complainant claims to have also exchanged with Jean-Marc Morandini via Twitter at the same time, in order to attend his broadcasts. In exchange, the host would have insistently asked him for a photo of his sex, “41 times in 50 days”, argued his lawyer. In order to “leave him alone”, the young man, then 15 years old, would have ended up sending “a photo of a sex found on the Internet”. During an exchange around the sport, he would also have been asked if he took his shower “naked or in his underwear” and if he “watch[t] the others” in the locker room.
When talking about his trip to Paris to attend a show, Jean-Marc Morandini would also have asked his interlocutor about where he would sleep. After the plaintiff replied laconically “in a bed”, he allegedly offered: “In mine?”. In court, the plaintiff, who filed a lawsuit in 2019, described the “rejection of [his] body” after this trauma and indicated that he was still on medication today.
The third plaintiff described a meeting with Jean-Marc Morandini in 2009, in a private mansion, as part of a casting for the remake of the film Ken Park. Then 16 years old, the young man says he was contacted by a person under a pseudonym, Claire. Greeted the day of the meeting by Jean-Marc Morandini, he claims to have been invited to undress completely, something he would have refused at first, before acceding to the request, in the face of the insistence of the animator. The latter would then have taken a photo of it.
Faced with the investigators, the plaintiff would have described the rest of the scene in these terms: “He wanted me to masturbate in front of him. He told me that the people who had already passed the casting had done it and that, if I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t have a role.” Embarrassed, the young man would have ended up leaving the place, in tears, wrote Le Parisien when the complaints were revealed.
This unfolding was also fleshed out in court. “He started asking me where I was from, my age and if I did a lot of castings,” the young man told the court. It was then that the film Ken Park, a sulphurous work by director Larry Clark, came into the conversation, recounting in the rawest way the sexual excesses of young American teenagers in 2002. “He played extracts on big TV “, continued the complainant in his testimony, saying he was marked by “a scene with a woman who had sex with two boys” and another where his future character had to strangle himself “with the belt of his grandmother’s bathrobe. mother while masturbating”.
Despite the discomfort of his young interlocutor, Jean-Marc Morandini reportedly commented on the scenes and then asked the young man to get up and stand against a wall. “He took pictures. His look changed […]. He encouraged me to undress, telling me that the others had done it”, continued the person concerned. “Shirtless”, then “in underwear” and finally “naked”, the plaintiff, paralyzed, said he was criticized for his “little sex”. He will affirm at the bar that Jean-Marc Morandini asked him to masturbate in front of him. “I don’t know what went through my head, but I looked at him and told him I wouldn’t. I got my stuff. I got dressed,” he said. he finished in front of the president of the court.
Placed in police custody in 2016 before being released and indicted, Jean-Marc Morandini has already acknowledged certain facts, but totally denied the coercion and corruption of minors. Contesting the very legitimacy of the trial, he had in particular appealed the dismissal order, made by an examining magistrate in 2020. But on November 23, 2021, the Paris Court of Appeal chose to reject the request of his lawyers. The host then seized the Court of Cassation, without more success: his appeal was rejected at the end of February 2022. While the defense demanded a closed session in this trial, the court again rejected his request, considering that the advertising was “not a danger to the serenity of the debates”.
In the case of the complaint for the exchange of messages on Twitter in 2013, Jean-Marc Morandini notably specified that he was not aware of the age of his interlocutor. Something he confirmed on the stand. In front of the court, Jean-Marc Morandini has indeed assured not to have asked the question of age, thinking of conversing with an adult. A statement questioned by the prosecution and the president, who jointly mentioned the young man’s profile photo, the fact that he explicitly mentioned his classes or his homework, or that he was accompanied by his parents on the shows…
As for the content of the messages, Jean-Marc Morandini pleaded the “moment of decompression” in the face of the “pressure” of the antenna. He also claimed freedom of expression regarding sex on social networks at the time: “We talked about everything, without really taboos. At that time, I was on NRJ12 where we talked a lot about sexuality, of love, of sleeping around. On social networks, we talked a lot about that, in a free way”.
And when it was necessary to explain the sex photo requested from the second plaintiff to be able to attend one of his broadcasts, Jean-Marc Morandini pleaded humor. “It was a joke, heavy, but a joke”, hammered the host, destabilized, after acknowledging this time that he knew that the recipient of the messages was a minor.
As part of the lawsuit related to the casting of the 2009 Ken Park remake, Morandini explained to investigators that, for him, “nudity” was not “a taboo”, while pointing out that he found ” bizarre” the way in which the complainant had told the facts, even judging the story “surreal”. A defense also taken up at trial: indicating that he had no precise memory of this 2009 meeting, Jean-Marc Morandini assured that the course described by his accuser does not correspond to his behavior. “When I receive an actor, I’m not going to insult him. I don’t recognize any of the words used by this young man. I’m very respectful,” he said.
But this defense has been torn to pieces several times by the plaintiffs’ lawyers, in particular when one of them, Me Francis Szpiner, recalled that the film Ken Park had been banned in 2004 for those under 18, before to try to dismantle the reality of the casting: Jean-Marc Morandini will have had to admit that he had not bought the film rights for his remake, nor even had a scriptwriter or director work on the project.
Jean-Marc Morandini is involved in another case, which also prompted the two complainants to file a complaint. That of the castings for the web series Les Faucons, which the host intended to produce in the mid-2010s. In a survey by Les Inrockuptibles magazine, published in July 2016, several actors claimed to have passed these castings in which they were asked to provide photos and videos showing them naked or masturbating. Charges that Morandini has denied.
An investigation was opened in 2016, but was dismissed in 2018 due to “insufficiently characterized offenses”. The sexual harassment investigation was relaunched following new complaints in the summer of the same year. A trial should therefore take place in 2023, for “sexual harassment” and “concealed work” this time. But the date has not been set.
