Tribunal de Loures Issues Seven- to Eight-Year Prison Sentences to Four Influencers for 2025 Rape of 16-Year-Old — 27 Crimes de Pornografia de Menores (Child Pornography Counts) and €50,000 Victim Damages Anchor the Verdict

The Tribunal Judicial de Loures (Loures District Court) on Friday 12 June 2026 handed down penas de prisão efetiva (effective prison sentences) of seven to eight years to four young influencers convicted of raping and filming a 16-year-old girl in Loures in 2025. The four were also ordered to pay the victim €50,000 in non-pecuniary damages and roughly €300 to the Unidade Local de Saúde Loures-Odivelas (Loures-Odivelas Local Health Unit) for the medical assistance the teenager received on the night of the assault.

The sentences

• Francisco Martins: 8 years in prison for two counts of violação agravada (aggravated rape), 27 counts of pornografia de menores (child pornography) and 3 counts of ofensa à integridade física (assault).
• Gabriel Malta: 8 years for two counts of aggravated rape, 27 counts of child pornography and 1 count of assault.
• Leonardo Saraiva: 7 years and 6 months for two counts of aggravated rape and 27 counts of child pornography.
• Hugo Ribeiro: 7 years for two counts of aggravated rape and 27 counts of child pornography.

The 27 child-pornography counts attached to each defendant reflect the volume of footage the panel found had been recorded and distributed by the group during and after the assault — a feature the court treated as a separate, repeated crime under Article 176 of the Código Penal (Penal Code).

How the case got here

The Polícia Judiciária (Judicial Police) opened the investigation in 2025 after the victim came forward and clips of the assault began circulating on closed-group chats. In October 2025, the Polícia Judiciária formally proposed charges; the Ministério Público (Public Prosecutor) followed with an indictment that bundled the rape counts with the documentation and distribution charges. Julgamento (trial) opened at the Tribunal de Loures on 13 April 2026 and ran for roughly two months. The four defendants — all known on social platforms as influencers with mid-five-figure audiences — were tried together.

Why the verdict reads heavier than the headline

The combination of pena efetiva (no suspension), the 27-count documentation tally and the €50,000 indemnização (compensation) places this case at the upper band of Portuguese sentencing for digitally documented sexual crimes. The Tribunal Constitucional has not yet ruled on a separate constitutional revision push from the SIRP (Sistema de Informações da República Portuguesa — Portuguese Republic Intelligence System) over phone-metadata access, but recent moves on the legal stack point in the same direction: the Assembleia da República's Lei de Política Criminal 2026-2028 elevated digital child-exploitation cases to a priority crime track, and the PGR's new ethics charter tightened the rules on how AI tooling can sit inside magistrate workflows.

What This Means for Expats

• Portuguese criminal courts move slower but land firm: The 12-to-14-month gap between PJ charging proposal and verdict is on the faster end for serious sexual-crime files. Expat families should not read public delays as signals of leniency — sentencing bands at the Tribunal Judicial level are calibrated to European benchmarks.
• Digital documentation is treated as a separate, multipliable crime: Filming and sharing a sexual act with a minor stacks under Article 176 of the Código Penal regardless of the platform's encryption. Parents of teens should know that closed-group sharing is prosecuted on the same footing as open distribution.
• Civil compensation is now landing in five figures: The €50,000 damages award sets a benchmark for non-pecuniary harm in influencer-network cases and is recoverable directly from the convicted, not the platform.
• SNS hospitals carry the post-assault evidence load: The €300 owed to ULS Loures-Odivelas reflects the way Portuguese hospitals collect both medical and forensic evidence in a single intake. If a minor reports an assault, the immediate stop is the local SNS hospital with a forensic capability, not the police station.
• Appeal window opens now: The defendants have a 30-day window to file recurso (appeal) to the Tribunal da Relação de Lisboa. Even with double-conformity rules narrowing the Supremo Tribunal de Justiça path, the verdict can still shift on first-instance appeal.

The verdict closes the first-instance chapter on one of 2025's most-watched social-media-linked sexual-crime cases. Watch the next 30 days for the recurso filings and any motion by the Ministério Público to push for sentence cumulation review — both will set the tone for similar cases moving through Portuguese criminal courts in the second half of the year.