Five years after the Ubisoft scandal, revealed in the pages of Libérationthe fifteenth chamber of the Bobigny Criminal Court pronounced sentences of up to three years in prison suspended against three of the former executives of the video game giant. The first major trial for moral and sexual harassment in the sector had opened in early June.
The most heavily condemned is the former vice-president of the Editorial Service Tommy François. He received a suspended sentence of three years in prison and 30,000 euros in fines, the sentence requested by the prosecutor for the charges of moral and sexual harassment and attempted sexual assault. It was through him that the scandal arrived in 2020. At the time, around twenty witnesses had described to Libération The atmosphere of Boys Club which then reigned at the Montreuillois headquarters of the video game giant. The former TV presenter was then designated there as the disrupting center of a system of sexist jokes and humiliations, ranging from repeated remarks on the physique of his collaborators to the cruel game-Liguage on a chair, used to make her nail, cat-bed.
Nourished by the concordant testimonies reported by the police investigation (up to the letter of dismissal for serious misconduct from Ubisoft which accuses François of all the evils in the company), the audiences will have long been around the toxic atmosphere that the vice-president has established since his position as chief and protégé of Serge Hascoët. His defense, which consisted in saying that his actions were only the product of a “joke culture” specific to the video game sector of which he himself had been the victim, was obviously not convinced. The fact that a Hascoët morality witness takes the court shortly by saying that she herself had been the victim of a sexual assault on the part of Tommy François a few years earlier will not have helped.
The man who had hired him gets better. Serge Hascoët, former number 2 of Ubisoft, is sentenced to his eighteen months suspended prison sentence and 45,000 euros in fines for complicity in moral harassment-the court according to the sentences requested by the prosecutor, who did not retain the charges of sexual harassment, insufficiently characterized. The charges against him can be divided into two groups. The court first attempted to bring to light the complicity of the creative guru of Ubisoft in the harassment deemed systemic which raged in the open space. A large part of the witnesses interviewed by the police reporting that Hascoët, by his aura, would have enabled his protégé Tommy François to act with impunity. The creative chief of Ubisoft being himself accused of having a sick or vulgar behavior towards certain employees.
A whole section of the debates will also have revolved around his behavior towards his assistants (or rather the assistants of his assistant), who described at length at the helm of his whims and pressing needs, who could overflow from the professional framework until you seem degrading-a round trip to Brittany to recover an IPAD during a day of leave, take care of administrative papers or the boss’s girl, when it was not necessary to go and get everything. to shell. Converted into a small boss of a modest video game studio, Hascoët defended himself by saying that he had no memory of all these events, that he had not seen anything from the actions of Tommy François, that he did not think of bad. He did not even imagine having to take care of management issues, too busy shaping the future of the company.
The last defendant, Guillaume Patrux, former “Game Director” of a virtual reality project, was sentenced to twelve months suspended prison sentence and to 10,000 euros fine for his violent and intimidating behavior towards the small team where he worked. The prosecutor had requested the same fine but a sentence of fifteen months in prison.
Update at 2:26 p.m. With the sentence of Guillaume Patrux
