Beaten for an Audience: France Convicts Two Streamers
For nearly two years, Raphaël Graven was slapped, kicked and humiliated for a paying online audience; in August 2025 he died during a marathon broadcast on the platform Kick. On Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026, a court in Nice convicted the two streamers who abused him of deliberate violence and incitement to hatred.
Two French streamers were convicted on Wednesday of inflicting violence on a man they had beaten and humiliated for a paying online audience over nearly two years, in a case that has forced France to confront the economy of live-streamed cruelty. Raphaël Graven, a 46-year-old known to hundreds of thousands of followers as “Jean Pormanove,” died in August 2025 during a marathon broadcast on the Australian-owned platform Kick.
A verdict in Nice
The criminal court in Nice found Owen Cenazandotti, 27, who streamed as “Naruto,” and Safine Hamadi, 24, guilty of deliberate violence against Graven and of incitement to hatred over the insults they directed at him, Agence France-Presse reported. Reuters carried the same account of the ruling.
Cenazandotti received a two-year suspended prison sentence and a €15,000 fine, and Hamadi an 18-month suspended sentence and a €5,000 fine, according to AFP. Both men were also barred from posting on social networks for six months. Because the terms are suspended, neither will serve time in prison unless he reoffends.
The court did not hold the two men responsible for Graven’s death. An autopsy found no traumatic injuries, and prosecutors said the probable causes appeared to be medical rather than the result of the on-camera violence, the BBC reported. The defendants had argued that the violence and humiliation were scripted and partly staged, and that Graven had consented.
Two years of abuse, streamed for money
Graven, who had roughly 500,000 subscribers, appeared for years in broadcasts on Twitch and later Kick in which he was beaten, kicked, shot with a paintball gun and force-fed while viewers watched live, NBC News reported. The streams were monetized in real time, with on-screen counters tallying viewer payments.
His final broadcast ran for roughly 300 hours; he died in his sleep while still being filmed, CBS News reported. Clips of the abuse circulated widely after his death, prompting public revulsion in France at content that had spread on fringe corners of the live-streaming world.
The platform in the dock
Kick, a live-streaming service registered in Australia, remains under formal investigation in France over Graven’s death. In January 2026, the Paris prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, sought arrest warrants for Kick executives who had failed to answer a summons and were located in Australia, AFP reported.
France’s government has repeatedly criticized the platform’s moderation. The digital affairs minister, Clara Chappaz, opened a referral against Kick after Graven’s death and said France had to move against what she cast as a lawless corner of the internet, NBC News reported.
A reckoning for ‘trash streaming’
The verdict is among the most prominent attempts in France to hold streamers criminally responsible for violence performed for an online audience — a genre critics call “trash streaming,” built on humiliation and abuse broadcast for engagement and cash. The prosecution, the platform investigation and Wednesday’s convictions together test whether the people who stage such content, and the services that host and monetize it, can be made to answer for it.