An Australian man who passed himself off as a Hare Krishna “guru” has been sentenced to 19 years in jail in France for repeatedly raping three teenage girls, reports The Guardian.
Sean O’Neil regularly raped the girls between 2009 and 2010 while they were aged about 15 and made psychologically dependent on the Australian. One expert testified that the girls cooperated because they were in a trance-like state approaching “hypnosis”.
He forced a total of four teenage girls to live as naked “slaves” in his French Riviera apartment in the town of Valbonne, where he subjected them to photo sessions to make child abuse images and made them recite the Hare Krishna mantra 1,700 times a day.
O’Neil, a 43-year-old computer programmer, was found guilty by a closed-door appeals court in the southern French city of Aix-en-Provence of multiple rape and of corrupting minors.
The court rejected O’Neil’s argument the sex was consensual to confirm a lower court’s October 2013 conviction, and lengthened an original sentence of 15 years in prison. It also barred him from re-entering France once he had served his time.