2023-12-19 05:34:26
More bad news for fans of the Vilebrequin Youtube channel. The two videographers running the account were fined Monday evening 3,000 euros each by the Charleville-Mézières court for using rifles and pistols during the filming of one of their videos.
The prosecution had requested six months’ suspended imprisonment and a fine of 500 euros, stressing that “this type of video and YouTubers are of particular interest to young people and adolescents in construction”, demanding from them “an exemplary attitude towards -vis their audience.” This decision comes ten days after the announcement of the end of Vilebrequin, the first automotive channel on YouTube in France with nearly 2.5 million subscribers, by the duo who explained that they wanted to take a breather after seven years of weekly production.
Pierre Chabrier, 29, and Sylvain Lévy, 30, were prosecuted for illegally carrying weapons, alongside a 25-year-old customs officer who had provided them with the weapons. The latter, the only one present in the courtroom on Monday, was sentenced to a fine of 2,000 euros and the confiscation of the weapons concerned.
Ten weapons were used
The facts date back to October 15, 2022 during the filming of a twenty-minute video entitled “Exploding a car by shooting at the tank: is it possible? “. We see the two videographers, renowned for their offbeat automobile tests, firing live ammunition at two cars destined for scrapping, in the countryside, on private land located in Belleville-et-Chatillon-sur-Bar (Ardennes). Ten firearms, four pistols and six rifles, were used.
The three men had already filmed a first video two years earlier, where an armored car had been targeted, but this had taken place in a shooting gallery. The prosecution stressed that the YouTubers’ accomplice “had no legitimacy to organize this shooting session and lend his weapons”. By relying on him, “my clients had the feeling that everything was lined up”, argued the lawyer for the Vilebrequin YouTubers, Me Arnaud Pelpel. During the filming of the video, “the gendarmes came, took selfies with them,” he argued.
As for exemplarity, in the video, the duo repeats around fifteen times “don’t do it again”, he recalled, pleading for release. The lawyer for their co-defendant, Me David Meunier, also called for the acquittal. “It’s the meeting between two worlds that he likes, the world of weapons and the world of YouTubers, of glitter, which generates this situation,” he said. His client, who was a firefighter, then a police officer before becoming a customs officer, “did not deliberately cross a prohibition”.
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