New trouble with the law for Thierry Casasnovas. The cantor of fasting and raw food, who has more than 500,000 subscribers on the online video platform YouTube, was placed in police custody until the evening of Thursday March 10, AFP learned. The hearing began on Tuesday, according to Le Parisian. The decision to present him to an examining magistrate for a possible indictment, in particular for “illegal practice of medicine”, must be taken this Friday. Justice has been interested for several years in this whimsical character with a disturbing audience.
For almost ten years, the man has distinguished himself by extolling the health benefits of raw foodism – the practice of eating exclusively raw foods. And has become essential in the world of alternative medicine and diets.
In his videos, he defends eating raw and abstinence to live better. It claims to cure cancer or diabetes without resorting to traditional medicine through a supposed miracle diet of fruits and vegetables. Even going so far as to claim that vegetable juice can regrow an amputated limb. Last November, the interministerial mission for vigilance and the fight against sectarian aberrations (Miviludes) was alarmed by the influence of Thierry Casasnovas on several followers who had “given up their medical treatment”.
Justice did not wait for the repeated calls of the gendarme of sectarian excesses to investigate the guru. During the summer of 2020, the Perpignan public prosecutor’s office had opened a judicial investigation against him for “illegal exercise of the profession of doctor”, “abuse of weakness” and “misleading commercial practices”, before adding, to the autumn 2021, the head of “economic and financial offences”.
As part of this investigation, the home of Thierry Casasnovas, in the Pyrénées-Orientales, had been searched in February 2022, without the influencer being placed in custody. It is now done.