The mayor of Saint-Étienne, Gaël Perdriau, stood trial on September 22nd over his role in an alleged sex-tape blackmail scandal, an extraordinary case that has tainted this city in south-east France for more than three years.
Faced with witness accounts, audio recordings and videos that shed light on his part in a homophobic plot against his own deputy, the mayor was driven out of the rightwing Les Républicains (LR) party, excluded from all relations with other institutions as mayor, and forced to abandon his national political ambitions of becoming a government minister.
Gaël Perdriau has also been subject to repeated attacks from the opposition, faced resignations within his own ruling majority on the city council, and endured protests at each of his public outings, including when going to restaurants. But, like a desperate man barricaded in his office, the mayor has clung to his job, loudly proclaiming his innocence and repeating that the courts would clear him when the time came.
After three years of an investigation that took place following initial revelations by Mediapart in August 2022, three investigating judges ruled in their final report, delivered on June 6th 2025, that the investigation had uncovered “criminal offences of a particular gravity”.
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In their 165-page report sending the accused for trial, the judges came to the conclusion that Gaël Perdriau had been at the heart of the trap set against his deputy mayor, centrist politician Gilles Artigues, a Catholic family man filmed without his knowledge in a Paris hotel room with a male escort in January 2015.
The Lyon prosecutor’s office had come to the same view in its final submissions on March 26th 2025. The mayor of Saint-Étienne, like all the accused in this trial, benefits from the presumption of innocence.
Sex tape as a tool of political pressure
According to the judges, the investigation clearly “established” that Gaël Perdriau had “on the one hand, long known that his first deputy had been entrapped and that he had not in any way consented and, on the other hand, that he knew those who carried out the entrapment”.
Secret recordings later made by Gilles Artigues – who for a time thought about killing himself and wanted to leave a trail for his family to follow – showed that in 2017 and 2018, the mayor had even directly threatened his victim that he would release the tape if the latter did not bow to his wishes. In one exchange, Gaël Perdriau speaks of the possibility of releasing extracts “sparingly” and to “small circles” of people.
On each occasion the sex tape itself appeared to be a means of pressuring the centrist not to stand in certain elections, for him to withdraw support from his allies, and to make “pledges of loyalty, of devotion, in a context of political and personal betrayals”, as the judges noted in their report.
At his trial in Lyon, which is expected to last a week, the mayor faces three charges: blackmail, misuse of public funds (for the alleged funding of the operation) and taking part in a conspiracy with the aim of planning a crime that carries a sentence of at least five years in jail. In the dock he is joined by three of his former close allies, whose testimonies weighed heavily against him as the inquiry progressed.
The mayor knew it was going to happen in Paris, and that there was going to be a compromising video.
A loyal aide to the mayor since the latter came to power in 2014, Gaël Perdriau's former chief of staff Pierre Gauttieri had at first done all he could to protect the mayor, dismissing any idea that there had been a plot against Gilles Artigues. But after being jailed in the summer of 2023 for breaking the terms of his judicial bail order, the man who boasted in recordings broadcast by Mediapart of being “without faith or law” and acting “like a criminal”, came to feel that too much had been heaped on him; and on December 18th 2023 Gauttieri spectacularly turned on Gaël Perdriau.
Questioned that day by the investigating judges, the mayor’s former right-hand man went back on his earlier statements and spilled the beans. According to him, it was indeed the mayor who “decided on the kompromat”. “When I put it to him, he gave his go-ahead,” Gauttieri insisted in front of the judges, repeating that “the mayor knew it was going to happen in Paris, and that there was going to be a compromising video”.
Gaël Perdriau's former assistant mayor in charge of education, Samy Kéfi-Jérôme, made the same about-face two months later. After denying to Mediapart in August 2022 the very existence of a sex tape - though he can be seen in the footage filmed in the hotel room - the councillor recovered his memory as more revelations, searches and hearings piled up.
On February 6th 2024, Samy Kéfi-Jérôme admitted in a hearing what everyone in the mayor’s circle already knew: that it was he who had lured his colleague Gilles Artigues into the trap, a fellow party member whose trust he had gained.
The assistant mayor confirmed that he had hidden a camera in a corner of the hotel room, leaving the deputy mayor alone with the male escort to film them without their knowledge, only to realise that the device did not have enough battery power to capture the whole scene.
It was also Samy Kéfi-Jérôme who first confronted Gilles Artigues with the sex tape. “It’s called a political insurance policy,” he told the deputy mayor at a meeting on September 18th 2016. The proof of this devastating confession was found by investigators in a forgotten recording that they managed to seize during a search.
In that same hearing before investigators on February 6th 2024, Samy Kéfi-Jérôme also portrayed Gaël Perdriau as one of the “sponsors” of the plot. By going through the text messages between those involved, police also found one in which the mayor – clearly well informed of the plot’s details – joked with the assistant mayor about the escort’s first name.
'Dirty tricks'
The mastermind of the scheme, the communications specialist Gilles Rossary-Lenglet, who at the time when the trap was laid was living with Samy Kéfi-Jérôme, also pointed the finger at the mayor, and never wavered in his stance. To both Mediapart and investigators, Gilles Rossary-Lenglet consistently confirmed his role in the planning and carrying out of the trap, even at the risk of incriminating himself.
A gay man and the victim of attacks during the La Manif pour tous demonstrations against same-sex marriage, the spin doctor justified his actions on the grounds of the stance adopted by Gilles Artigues, who had campaigned against legalising marriage for same-sex couples. When he was a Member of Parliament (2002-2007), Artigues had also fought against an ad campaign for a gay show, pointing to the need for the “protection of minors” in public spaces.
Gilles Rossary-Lenglet, who describes himself as a “dirty tricks operator”, also admitted to being paid 40,000 euros – part of which he says he passed on to his ex-partner Samy Kéfi-Jérôme, though the latter denies it – through misused city hall grants. The heads of two local groups, which each received 20,000 euros in funds as a result of some poorly drawn up applications, are also facing trial in the same court for breach of trust.
Unlike the other defendants, Gilles Rossary-Lenglet and Pierre Gauttieri will also be tried for trying to set up another trap, this time against the former rightwing mayor of the city Michel Thiollière (1994-2008), over whom they wanted a political hold too. After the success of their attempt against Gilles Artigues, the two men planned to trap the former mayor by filming him with an underage prostitute whom they then intended to send back to eastern Europe.
Gilles Artigues and Michel Thiollière are both civil litigants in the case, in which status they were joined on the eve of the trial by the anti-corruption group ANTICOR. It wants to attack the “possible mafia-like methods” that were employed, and to denounce a “democratic hostage-taking of citizens”. The other forgotten victim of this affair, the escort filmed without his knowledge to be used in political blackmail, told Mediapart he would not attend the proceedings.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter