Paris, Aug 5, (dpa/GNA) – A court in Nice on Wednesday, convicted two men involved in livestreams featuring a well-known French streamer, who died on camera, finding them guilty of grievous bodily harm, incitement to hatred, online violence and discrimination.
One of the men received a two-year suspended sentence and a fine of €10,000 ($11,000), while the other was sentenced to an 18-month suspended sentence and a fine of €5,000. Both men were also banned from using social networks for six months, and had all their IT equipment confiscated.
The streamer, who went by the stage name Jean Pormanove and had hundreds of thousands of followers, used various social media platforms for gaming broadcasts, and repeatedly subjected himself to extreme challenges online.
Pormanove was beaten during a live broadcast in August last year, dying a few hours later after suffering a choking fit in his sleep while still being filmed.
A post-mortem examination found that the 46-year-old streamer, had not died as a result of the abuse, but from a medical cause.
The two convicted men, aged 24 and 27, had run the channel which broadcast Pormanove’s beating. They had already been questioned by prosecutors before the streamer’s death, due to earlier indications of abuse.
At the time, they said it was a staged performance to make money, in line with a statement made by Pormanove himself. However, before his death, it seemed the violence went too far for Pormanove. “I’m fed up, I want to leave,” the streamer wrote in a message to his mother, according to the broadcaster BFMTV.
GNA