A 40-year-old man, with no criminal record and father of two children, has been formally charged with raping and sexually abusing 34 minors aged between three and nine years old between 2020 and 2024 in Lucenay, a village of just over 2,000 inhabitants near the city of Lyon (France). He filmed and photographed the victims, classmates of his children, and committed the acts when the minors went to play with them at his house during so-called “pajama parties.”
Romain G. has been formally charged with rape, sexual abuse, and possession of pedophilic images, according to the Villefranche-sur-Saône Prosecutor’s Office, which is handling the case. Suspicions about this man’s criminal activity date back to 2024, although investigators have been adding charges and victims as the investigation progressed.
It all began in December 2024, when the parents of three of the minors reported to the gendarmerie the abuses that these children said they had suffered from the father of another student from the same school during the “pajama parties” organized at the home of the latter’s children.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, the accused was interrogated, held in police custody, and released, but had to be hospitalized for a few days after attempting to take his own life. Afterwards, he was placed in pretrial detention. Investigators began analyzing his files and, after interrogating the three reporting minors and other children, expanded the investigation.
The agents “focused on exploiting Romain G.’s computer material.” Initially, they found 127 videos and 197 photographs involving about thirty minors. The acts were committed when the children were awake, but also while they were asleep.
During this time, “work has been done to try to identify and interrogate them all,” with the support of the family protection house (MPF, in French), the gendarmerie service specialized in assisting minors in these types of cases.
Read more The 50 most influential people of the last 50 years
“After the interrogations and the rigorous work of file exploitation,” the charges were expanded, not only to the initial three victims but to about thirty identified children, although “not all have been victims of the same acts,” specified prosecutor Laetitia Francart. Some suffered abuse, others rape, and others were filmed naked.
From the beginning, the accused has admitted to the crimes. Before attempting to take his own life, he left a letter to his family in which he said: “I think I was born this way, I never chose to like children… very young. I have hated myself for this,” he wrote in a letter, reported by the newspaper Le Monde, the media outlet that uncovered the case.
“A clear and repeated pedophilic deviation”
According to this French newspaper, which had access to the psychiatric examinations by experts who saw him in prison, Romain G., who worked in the film industry, “has a clear and repeated pedophilic deviation” and presents a high criminal danger. The gendarmes ended up finding more than 300 photos and videos.
Lucenay is a small village near Lyon. For months, there has been a psychological unit at the R.D. school, where the children of the accused and the victims study, to support the minors, with psychologists and lawyers serving the families. “At this point, the case investigation continues to precisely determine the context in which the acts were committed,” the prosecutor specifies.
This case emerges just over two months after the case of Jacques Leveugle, a 79-year-old man, also with no criminal record, who abused 89 children in about ten countries. Exactly one year ago, one of the biggest pedophiles in recent times in France, Joël Le Scouarnec, a former surgeon who raped more than 300 victims, mostly minors, during his professional practice, was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Read more The EL PAÍS festival starts this Friday at Matadero Madrid