A tree, a rope, a letter. After surviving a suicide attempt, a man revealed he had committed numerous crimes against children. After a year-long and controversial investigation, he was charged, on April 10, with rape and sexual assault of minors and recording child pornography.

To structure their investigation, the gendarmes had to create two charts. The first looks a bit like a class photo board. But instead of being stored in a school's archives, the three dozen portraits of young boys were assembled in a police report in Villefranche-sur-Saône, in the southern Beaujolais area. Snapshots of the children – all between the ages of 3 and 9 at the time of the incidents – were captured in the video-recorded depositions: hoodies and t-shirts, tousled brown hair, anxious and serious expressions.

Four columns make up the second chart. The leftmost lists the first and last names of the victims. It is followed by columns indicating the various offenses: recording or producing pornographic images of a minor, sexual assault, and rape. Investigators either marked "yes," noting the dates, or left the box blank. In total, each category totals about 60 or so incidents. All of them were committed and filmed by the same man, Romain G., in the village of Lucenay, between 2020 and 2024.

Despite its staggering scale, at the heart of the case are three fourth-grade children who told their parents about assaults committed by their school friend's father during sleepovers at his home. After being taken in for questioning in December 2024 following these accusations, Romain G. was released, but later attempted to take his own life. While being treated in the hospital, he confessed to having abused a much larger number of victims and to having filmed 200 videos depicting the violence. He has been held in jail since then, and on April 10, was formally charged for offenses involving a total of 34 victims. According to the videos recovered by the police, he raped or forced sexual acts on at least 23 of them, and filmed all of them naked.

These figures raise a host of questions inherent to major child sexual abuse cases. How was Romain G. able to reach such a level of predatory behavior without being detected? What support protocols have been put in place to help children and their families heal from the severe wounds? What place do minors and sexual violence hold in society for such cases to continue to occur?

These questions have been tormenting Nicolas and Sophie, the parents of Paul, 8. (All plaintiffs' first names have been changed to protect their identity.) In the sunlit room where they agreed to speak with journalists, both of them knitted their fingers together anxiously. For months, ever since the fateful phone call from a police officer first alerted them to the violence their son had been subjected to, they have been wracked with a sense of shame and guilt. The call came through last winter, while they were in the car with their son. Sophie was driving, so Nicolas answered the phone. "Paul is included in the case," the investigator informed him. "There are three categories of victims: images, assaults and rapes," the officer continued. "Your son is in all three."

'Forbidden hugs'

During the call, Nicolas's mind froze. He asked the officer to send the details via email. When they arrived at their house in Lucenay, he sent Paul to play in his room, then locked himself in his own room with Sophie. It wasn't until then that he broke down. "My son, he's my weak spot. I would have preferred it to be me," Nicolas said, his hand clinging tightly to his wife's. In 20 years together, she had never seen him cry.

Nicolas took a month's medical leave. "It's worse than a stab wound, because a stab wound is visible. It can be operated on and heal," he explained. Pedophilia is more like a slow-action cluster bomb, tearing apart everything in its path. Nicolas and Sophie had to call their close ones, to stammer out sentences containing the words "Paul" and "rape." They had to face the overwhelming sense of parental failure for not having protected their boy. They had to sit him down and tell him, "While you were sleeping, someone gave you kisses and hugs that are forbidden." And, day in and day out, they had to keep taking him to his elementary school in Lucenay. Most of the victims still attended the school; in some classes, the majority of the boys were affected.

Until then, the village bustling with sedans carrying visitors to the wine-producing Beaujolais region was perhaps best known for its golf course. Houses with large bay windows face out toward vineyards and fields of yellow canola. In many ways, it was the picture-perfect setting for a young couple like Nicolas and Sophie, who work in Lyon, just 25 kilometers away. Lucenay had all of the advantages of small-town life: the gentle hum of lawn mowers, streets with names like "Chemin de la Poésie" (Poetry Path) and "Montée des Ecoliers" (Schoolchildren's Climb), a preschool with a collection of tiny, colorful bikes, and an elementary school with chickens wandering its gardens.

At the end of the school day, witnesses struggled to discuss the case, of which they only knew the vague initial details reported by the local press a year earlier – at that time, only assaults against three children had been mentioned. "It's difficult, we feel contaminated," the grandmother of a student said, before leaning down to hug her grandson. "There was Mazan, let's hope there won't be Lucenay," another person worried, referring to another mass sexual assault case in which a man, Dominique Pelicot, drugged and had dozens of strangers rape his unconscious wife, Gisèle, in the town of Mazan. The child sexual abuse affair has left residents of the 2,000-person town paralyzed. In a small place where everybody knows one another, it's impossible not to conjure the mental image of the 40-year-old man committing sexual abuse against small children.

"I don't have the image, and I don't want it," said Sophie, Paul's mother. "I have it in my head," said Nicolas. "That's what he accomplished: He forced me to imagine an adult's sexuality imposed on my kid, who was 6 years old at the time. What do you even do with a 6-year-old, seriously?" the father asked, furious. The question leads back to Romain G., who has been locked up in a cell in Lyon for a year.

A history of alleged abuse

A "marked pedophilic deviance" is how the prison's psychiatric examiner described the alleged perpetrator of the crimes. The analysis was based on several factors: the longevity and serial nature of the acts, the extreme youth of the victims, the variety of methods used, and the fact that the victims were outside of family circles. Noting his "criminological dangerousness," the criminality expert wrote that Romain G.'s tendencies manifested themselves in the form of "sexually arousing fantasies involving prepubescent children aged 3 to 9, sexual impulses and repeated acts of rape, as well as strategies to maintain secrecy."

Where did Romain G.'s descent into serious sexual crime begin? He himself tried to trace the path in a text written from prison, entitled: "The story of the child I was, and how I was raped and raped children." In psychological interviews, the film set manager mentioned the sexual violence inflicted on him by an older cousin when he was only 8 or 9 years old. Researchers estimate that between one-third and one-half of offenders were themselves previously assaulted. But correlation does not make imitation automatic. Twenty-five years after his own rape, Romain G. became the godfather of his cousin's son – and raped him about 10 times, from the ages of 3 to 5.

Romain G. grew up surrounded by sexualized images of children. He studied film, became a movie assistant, and worked on the set of the series Kaamelott, where he met Elodie, the mother of his two children. Together, they moved to Lucenay. "It was my jewel: a beautiful house, two children, a wife," he told investigators. It was also the perfect setting for him to hide the pedophilia that was devouring him. According to his partner, the marriage was far less idyllic. Elodie said Romain G. was a "very manipulative" man who "had a problem with women." "He took revenge on me," she told investigators. "On a violence scale, the risk meter was always set to orange." According to several people close to them, Romain G. treated his daughter badly in comparison to his son.