French engineer sentenced to one year under house arrest for running deepfake pornography site
A 47-year-old from Nice was handed a two-year sentence, with one year suspended, after managing a platform hosting over 300,000 sexual deepfakes of female celebrities.
The conviction
Cyrille Bourgeois, a previously law-abiding IT engineer, was sentenced on 7 July 2026 by the Paris criminal court to two years in prison, one of which is to be served under electronic bracelet surveillance, and a €10,000 fine. The court also ordered him to pay €5,000 in damages to each of the 13 civil parties. Defence lawyer Me Sarah Girand and civil party lawyer Me Matthieu Davy confirmed the sentence. The prosecutor had sought a three-year sentence, with two suspended.
The platform
Since around 2007, Bourgeois ran CFake, a website dedicated to hosting and sharing pornographic deepfakes and photomontages. Investigators found over 300,000 images and 7,000 videos, with approximately 50 new uploads daily. The site attracted up to 4 million visitors per month and generated revenue through advertisements. According to a statement from the US Department of Justice, which alerted French authorities, users could browse content using keywords such as "rape", "constraint", and "degradation".
The victims
The non-consensual sexual imagery targeted nearly 14,000 individuals worldwide, including 660 French women. Thirteen of them, mainly celebrities and public figures, brought civil actions. Among them were Brigitte Macron, Audrey Tautou, Ségolène Royal, Christine Lagarde, Anne-Sophie Lapix, and Karine Le Marchand. Actress Gwendolyn Gourvenec, the only plaintiff to attend the trial in person, told the court:
I feel dirty, humiliated.
The defendant's statement
Bourgeois admitted the facts from his initial police custody in early June. He told the court he started the site as a technical challenge and later saw a shift toward exclusively sexual content but did nothing to reverse it. He added that he believed he was operating "at the limit of legality."
At the beginning, it was a technical competition, to see if people liked my work. I should have realised the harm I could do.
Legal context
The defendant was prosecuted under two recently enacted laws: managing an online platform allowing illicit transactions, created in 2023, and distributing algorithmically generated sexual content reproducing an identifiable person without consent. The conviction is one of the first under these new provisions.
