Saad Lamjarred Prison Sentence Threatens Music Career

On Friday, May 15, 2026, the Draguignan assize court imposed a sentence of five years imprisonment on Saad Lamjarred. The prosecution had initially demanded ten years in prison for these acts. Upon the verdict being announced, pronounced without an immediate arrest warrant, the artist broke down in tears while embracing his wife and her mother. His lawyers, who have always argued for consensual relations, remained silent as they left this trial held in camera at the complainant’s request.

On Bladi.net : Saad Lamjarred Sentenced 5 Years Prison Rape Conviction

The case stems from the complaint of a French woman, aged 28 at the time of the facts, met in August 2018 in a nightclub in Saint-Tropez. The young woman reported violent sexual assault in a hotel room, which occurred after she refused to kiss him. Facing the singer’s defense argument, the investigating chamber in Aix-en-Provence clarified that a woman entering a room in no way equates to sexual consent. The court also ordered the accused, who already served three months in pre-trial detention in 2018, to pay 30,000 euros in compensation and 5,000 euros in court costs.

This verdict comes to darken an already heavily burdened criminal record, marked by a previous conviction to six years in prison in the Paris case involving Laura Prioul. The appeal judgment in this case remains blocked by an attempted blackmail aimed at extorting three million euros from the star in exchange for dropping the proceedings. Although the victim was cleared of this extortion, five other people were sanctioned, including his mother and his lawyer. The latter was also banned from practicing her profession for ten years with immediate execution.

On Bladi.net : Saad Lamjarred rape trial Var assizes new accuser

These successive judicial decisions directly threaten the career of the man who transformed Moroccan music into a huge Arab digital phenomenon. Since the success of his flagship track "M3allem," he has imposed his dialect against classical oriental productions and has maintained a very large audience despite the accumulation of accusations since 2016, including in Casablanca and New York. However, the legal noose is tightening dangerously around the artist. The accumulation of these criminal sentences now very clearly raises the question of a definitive end to the singer’s career.