Overview

• The case opened before the departmental criminal court in Aix-en-Provence, where Julien Palisca has been held in pre-trial detention since 2021.
• He is charged over alleged rapes and sexual assaults committed in 2018 against two Manila street brothers and for possessing about 3,000 child sexual abuse images and videos.
• An IGPN inquiry launched in 2021 after a 2020 alert about inappropriate messages to a 17-year-old led to searches that uncovered illicit material and a written account describing assaults.
• Investigators located the two brothers in 2024; they joined the case as civil parties and will testify remotely, the elder from prison and the younger from the French embassy.
• The hearings are public with child-protection groups present, early sessions were disrupted by courtroom flooding, and experts depicted Palisca as manipulative and leveraging child-protection roles to access vulnerable minors.