A court in Paris has handed suspended six-month prison terms to Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky and his girlfriend for their roles in leaking a sex video that helped upend the Paris mayoral race and bring down a close ally of President Emmanuel Macron in 2020.
French media reports said on October 11 that Pavlensky and Alexandra de Taddeo will be wearing electronic bracelets for half a year.
The couple was shortly detained in February 2020 and charged with invasion of privacy and publishing images of a sexual nature without consent over the leaking of the video that forced Benjamin Griveaux to end his mayoral campaign.
Griveaux, a married father of three and member of Macron’s centrist La Republique En Marche (LREM) party, pulled out of the race after the scandal broke.
French media reports said at the time the videos were believed to have been sent in May 2018 by Griveaux, then the government spokesman, to de Taddeo before she became Pavlensky's girlfriend.
Pavlensky has claimed responsibility for posting the video online, saying he was “glad to have done this” to denounce “hypocrisy" and "lies” by Griveaux.
Pavlensky is known for attention-grabbing protests aimed at breaking through public indifference to perceived oppression.
In 2019, a French court handed Pavlensky a prison sentence for setting fire to the facade of a French central bank building in 2018 but allowed him to walk free for time served in pretrial detention.
In an interview with RFE/RL in February 2018, Pavlensky said he targeted the Bank of France because it "remains a symbol of occupation for Paris" and "a firm symbol for suppression of all revolutionary beginnings."
The stunt echoed one Pavlensky carried out in Moscow in November 2015, when he set fire to a door of the headquarters of the Russian Federal Security Service. He spent six months in pretrial detention in that case before he was convicted and fined about $8,000.
In the past, he has nailed his scrotum to Moscow's Red Square, sewn his lips together, wrapped himself naked in barbed wire, and chopped off part of his ear.
Pavlensky fled Russia in 2017 and was granted political asylum in France.