Summary:
A lawyer from Monaco is accused of possession of thousands of child pornography comics.
Full Story:
A Monaco lawyer has been accused of possessing thousands of pornographic comic books. The lawyer, who is accustomed to defending clients, appeared in court to face charges of possessing child pornography. It is estimated that there were 44,000 such comic books in his collection, which contained over 179,000 digitized comics in total. The lawyer claims that he went through a period in which he compulsively downloaded comic book anthologies from peer-to-peer websites. He first suggests that there may be a conspiracy against him and then offers another explanation for how the comic books ended up on his computer.
The case against the lawyer dates back to 2015 when a dispute arose between art dealer Yves Bouvier and Dmitry Rybolovlev, the owner of AS Monaco football club. Rybolovlev accused Bouvier of defrauding him out of one billion euros during the sale of masterpieces. The lawyer was targeted in a search carried out to uncover the source of leaked information related to the case. While no evidence of leaked information was found, pornographic images involving minors were discovered on his computer.
The accused defended himself in court, claiming that he had been targeted by the police and that they should not have interfered in the case due to their own conflicts of interest. He denied intentionally downloading the files and suggested that they may have been acquired through torrent downloads. One of his defense lawyers supported this theory, stating that unwanted files could be obtained from the computer of another user who had shared comic book anthologies. The accused admitted that he had not reviewed all of the downloaded files, given their large number.
The accused stated that he had never opened any of the comic books before this case and that the event logs on his computer could have proven that. However, the logs were destroyed by the expert who performed the computer copy. The defense argued for acquittal based on the principle of “benefit of the doubt,” while the prosecutor requested a three-month suspended sentence and a fine of €5,000. The prosecutor recognized that possession of computer-generated images is not as dangerous as possessing real ones. The prosecutor also expressed the desire for a psychiatric examination of the lawyer, but the request was not made by the investigating judges. The verdict will be announced on November 5th.
Source:
Monaco Tribune
