“I feel resistance and a whiny voice replies, ‘It’s my bag’… A small man in briefs, in his 40s, finally emerges after a few minutes that seem like an eternity.”

With the help of pool staff, the man was detained until police arrived and later charged with aggravated voyeurism.

The 38-year-old man, who has no previous convictions, is separately being investigated for possession of child pornography.

Victims urged to come forward

Pierre Rabadan, the city’s deputy mayor for sports, said there is a gap between the cases pouring in on social media and official police reports, and urged victims to come forward if they suspect that they too had been filmed.

“We have relatively few cases reported to us,” he told Le Parisien, noting that since 2020 they have received about five official complaints.

“We need to collect these testimonies to ensure this happens as little as possible.”

Along with inspecting fitting rooms for peepholes, the city’s plan includes increased monitoring and training of agents, public messaging campaigns and studying the redesign of fitting rooms.

“The City of Paris is and will remain committed to ensuring that Parisian swimming pools remain safe places, accessible to all, where no woman should avoid going for fear of being assaulted. The city will always stand by victims,” a City of Paris statement said.

The use of hidden cameras came under the spotlight in the case of Dominique Pelicot who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for enlisting 50 strangers to rape his drugged wife, Gisèle.

His crimes were only discovered after a security guard caught him filming up the skirts of women in a supermarket.

‘Endemic’ sexual violence

On Wednesday, a report by French politicians found that sexual violence and sexual harassment were “endemic” in France’s entertainment industry.

Sandrine Rousseau, a Green MP, and centrist Erwan Balanant found that all sectors of the French culture and entertainment industry had become infected by “systemic, endemic and persistent” bullying, sexual violence and harassment.

The report follows last month’s sexual assault trial of Gerard Depardieu, which is being seen as a turning point for the #MeToo movement in France.

The 76-year-old actor is accused of sexually assaulting two women on a film set in 2021. Both have said that he touched them on intimate parts of the body. He denies being a sexual abuser.