Paris (AFP)

Television host Jean-Marc Morandini was returned to the Paris Criminal Court for "corruption of a minor", accusations he disputes, we learned Friday from concordant sources, confirming information from the Parisian.

Four years after the opening of an investigation, the examining magistrate ordered Thursday that the host of CNews and NRJ12 be tried for bribery of a minor over 15 years of age and bribery of a minor by person in contact with the victim by an electronic communications network, in accordance with the prosecution's requisitions, said a judicial source.

Jean-Marc Morandini, now 54 years old, was indicted in 2016 after two young men, minors at the time of the facts they denounce, took legal action.

"This is a decision in line with the way in which this file has been treated since the preliminary investigation, that is to say exclusively at the charge. We are more in the moral than in the right", reacted with AFP the lawyer of Mr. Morandini, Me Corinne Dreyfus-Schmidt.

The latter stressed having appealed against the order for reference to the criminal court and the rejection of her latest requests for an act. It demands in particular that all the messages exchanged by the host be used in the file, and not just a selection.

In the first complaint, a young man claimed that Mr. Morandini had made him sexual proposals in SMS exchanges, between February and March 2013.

The second plaintiff, who has since withdrawn, had for his part told to have been contacted in July 2009 by the production company of Mr. Morandini via a casting site for a project of remake of the film "Ken Park" of the American director Larry Clark, who told the story of teenage life in the United States between boredom, sex and violence.

He explained to have been invited, alone, to the host's home where the latter would have invited him to undress and to reproduce a masturbation scene, according to the Parisian.

In another case, Jean-Marc Morandini was accused of "sexual harassment" and "hidden work" by several actors in 2016, as part of an article in Les Inrocks magazine on naked castings.

These actors claim that the host and his company "Ne Zappez pas! Production" took advantage of the castings of an erotic web-series, "Les Faucons", to push them to show off naked while being filmed or while filming themselves.

Seized of this complaint, the Paris prosecutor's office had closed its investigation in January 2017. But the plaintiffs obtained in 2018 the resumption of the investigations by a Parisian examining magistrate.

© 2020 AFP