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A Paris criminal court began hearing evidence on Monday in the closed-door trial of a 29-year-old Indian national accused of directing an international online network that groomed, blackmailed and tortured underage girls, in a case that prosecutors describe as one of the most disturbing child exploitation investigations in recent French legal history.
The defendant, Rohan Rane, was arrested in 2021 and appeared in the dock wearing a white T-shirt, according to courtroom sketches produced during the first day of proceedings. He is charged with torture or acts of barbarity against minors, organised extortion and the dissemination of child sexual abuse material. If convicted on all counts, he could face a sentence of up to life imprisonment.
Investigators allege that Rane served as the leader of a loosely organised but highly disciplined online collective that called itself CVLT. According to a court document released by the US Department of Justice, the group adopted what it described as neo-Nazism, nihilism and paedophilia as its core principles. Its members are said to have communicated primarily through Discord, the popular messaging platform, where they exchanged instructions, imagery and material documenting the abuse of their victims.
The prosecution's case stretches across multiple continents. The victims were predominantly underage girls living in the United States, the Netherlands, Britain and Estonia, while the alleged perpetrators were men based in Germany, New Zealand and the United States. The group is said to have harboured racist and anti-Semitic beliefs and to have expressed open hostility toward feminists and the LGBTQ+ community — an ideological profile that investigators argue was central to how the network selected and treated its targets rather than incidental to the crimes.
The investigation was set in motion in November 2020, when the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received a report that would ultimately expose the ring's activities. The child protection organisation had discovered online images of a 12-year-old girl with her chest exposed, accompanied by another user encouraging her to carve the name "Rohan" into her own body. That detail — a victim being coerced into permanently marking herself with the alleged ringleader's name — became one of the earliest and most striking pieces of evidence linking the abuse to the defendant now standing trial in Paris.
According to the investigation, the group's method followed a consistent and calculated pattern. Members identified vulnerable minors through Instagram and other social media platforms, cultivated contact with them, and persuaded them to send naked photographs. Once those images were in hand, the perpetrators allegedly used them as leverage, threatening to publish the pictures or to place fake emergency calls that would bring security forces to the victims' homes. The coercion was designed to leave young girls with no apparent avenue of escape.
Having established that control, the ring members — who referred to themselves as "warlords" — are accused of forcing their victims to perform sexual acts against their will, in some cases involving knives. Victims, described by their abusers as "slaves" and often selected because they were Jewish or black, were allegedly ordered to carve the names of their tormentors or Nazi swastikas into their skin. Others were incited to take their own lives by drinking bleach or by strangling themselves with a belt or a leash, according to the account presented by investigators.
The human toll of the case is being represented in court by five American women, now aged between 18 and 21, who have joined the proceedings as civil parties. They were expected to give testimony by video link during the week. Their participation marks an unusual feature of the trial: years after the abuse is alleged to have occurred, the victims themselves are seeking to confront the man accused of orchestrating it.
The court's decision to hold the trial behind closed doors followed a request from US authorities. In defending that ruling, the court noted that the group had already attempted to intimidate victims and witnesses and had issued threats against American prosecutors. It also observed that videos depicting the torture and humiliation of victims — many of them under the age of 15 — were expected to be screened as evidence during proceedings scheduled to run through Friday.
Those concerns about witness safety and the nature of the material have shaped the conduct of the trial from its opening day. Hippolyte Marquetty, a lawyer representing the five US victims, argued unsuccessfully against the closed-door format, but said his clients regarded the case as an opportunity to draw attention to the dangers teenage girls encounter on social media. Backed by child protection organisations, the victims' legal team has framed the trial as a chance to warn families about how quickly online grooming can escalate into sustained, remote abuse.
The international dimension of the case has already produced at least one conviction elsewhere. A 26-year-old US citizen identified as one of the group's "warlords" has been sentenced in the United States for abducting and raping a 12-year-old girl in 2021. That outcome illustrates how the network's activities translated from online coercion into physical crimes, and it underscores the cross-border cooperation that has underpinned the broader investigation.
Rane's personal trajectory forms part of the narrative prosecutors are expected to present. He came to France to study at a business school in Antibes, in the country's south-east, before going on to work as a fitness coach. His transition from student to fitness professional is not itself relevant to the charges, but investigators describe it as the backdrop against which he allegedly ran the group's operations remotely through Discord while living in France.
For French authorities, the trial represents a significant test of how the criminal justice system handles offences that are simultaneously digital, transnational and ideological. The charges of torture or acts of barbarity against minors are among the most serious in the French penal code, and the allegation that they were committed through online coercion rather than direct physical contact raises complex questions about jurisdiction and evidence that the court will have to address.
The case also highlights the role of platforms such as Discord, Instagram and other social media services in facilitating contact between adults and children. While the companies involved are not defendants in the proceedings, the evidence is expected to show how routine features of these services — private messaging, image sharing and the ability to operate under pseudonyms — were exploited by a group that deliberately sought out vulnerable young people.
Proceedings are scheduled to continue through Friday, with testimony from the five American civil parties expected to form a central part of the week's hearings. The court must determine whether Rane was, as investigators contend, the leader of the network, or whether his role was more limited than the prosecution alleges. Whatever the outcome, the trial has already drawn attention to a form of abuse that unfolds entirely through screens, often leaving victims isolated from the adults who might otherwise have intervened.
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