58,000 files of abused children, a thousand lies: the Teichtmeister case

Austria apologizes. With the children in the shelter after 1945 who were abused by the church and the government. The vote in Parliament resembles a funeral service, speeches are given and five actors recite original texts from victims.

One of them, clearly moved and with restrained rage, reads about a boy who was beaten with a diabolical fantasy, whose underpants were stuffed dirty into the mouth by the directors of the home, who fled after being beaten by an overseer and was almost beaten to death by the police. The reader is Florian Teichtmeister, a popular 36-year-old actor at the time. The whole event is called “State Act” and is titled “Gesture of Responsibility”. The public loves that Teichtmeister and the others are so responsible in the service of abused children

It is November 17, 2016. Teichtmeister has been collecting pornographic images of children on the dark web for eight years. As an actor, he knows how to pretend and disguise. He also once played a pedophile abuser who was abused as a child in a crime TV series. And six years later, in October 2022, he plays an actor in the play “Next door” at the Burgtheater, who fucks a 16-year-old during a shoot, directed by Burgtheater director Martin Kusej. Everything goes.

But in October 2022, Teichtmeister has known for over a year that nothing will soon be possible. Because the police have had his files for more than a year and he himself is in therapy and in constant contact with a lawyer. Michael Rami is a so-called “celebrity lawyer”, who was the media lawyer of the FPÖ for more than 20 years.

Teichtmeister’s ex-girlfriend, a school teacher two years his junior, came across a collage he made in the summer of 2021. It showed a child he had photographed filming together and was given a speech bubble with pornographic text. The teacher filed a report against Teichtmeister and the police seized numerous data carriers during a house search in August 2021, including 13 external hard drives containing 58,000 child pornography files (analyzed to date): containing photos, some videos and several collages depicting minors involved with Teichtmeister had filmed. In addition, his ex has reported him for violence in the relationship.

Since the presumption of innocence applies until an admission of guilt or a lawsuit, Teichtmeister’s name was anonymized in the case, which quickly spread. Some knew it was him and immediately broke off any collaboration, such as film director Sebastian Brauneis. Others like Martin Kusej confronted him, Teichtmeister told everyone the same thing which was that it was a notorious vendetta by his ex-girlfriend.

Everyone claimed that he did it very convincingly and credibly, no one felt the need to investigate or contact the ex-girlfriend. He confided in Kusey that he and his ex would even get closer again, that all rumors were unfounded and that there was no investigation against him. Kusey breathed a sigh of relief. The story of the crazy ex sounded plausible.

He also denied everything to the director Marie Kreutzer, in whose Sisi film “Corsage” Teichtmeister played Emperor Franz-Joseph. The production team of “Corsage” now announces: “Since the end of shooting in July 2021, Florian Teichtmeister no longer has an employment relationship with us. Nevertheless, we would have expected that he would have informed us at the latest at the start of the police investigation of the accusations against him. The opposite was the case: after the first rumors appeared after the end of the shooting in autumn 2021, Florian Teichtmeister assured a devoted request – not only credible to us – that the rumors about him were wrong. »

Florian Teichtmeister is a fantastic and award-winning actor. Since 2016, he has played a detective in a wheelchair in the crime series “Die Toten von Salzburg”, a role that has triggered a great sensitization process in him, as he likes to say: “Today, when I enter a bar or a public building, then it immediately strikes me: there is no ramp for a wheelchair user here.” In his spare time he trains with a wheelchair basketball team.

Everything goes up on Friday the 13th. On Friday, January 13, 2023, as January is called in Austria. For more than a year, no one spoke about the accusations against Teichtmeister, the short media storm had subsided, the Burgtheater was happy that its star could remain a star, and “Corsage” celebrated a triumph at many film festivals (including the ZFF). You had never seen Sisi like this, Franzl like that, and it was great that the film was suddenly on the Oscar shortlist for best foreign film.

Everything is different on January 13, 2023. Teichtmeister confessed. And with the IOU, his name can also become public. From February 8, he will stand trial and plead guilty. The Burgtheater fires him. The ORF takes all films and series from the program, a little later also the ZDF. Several cinemas decide to stop showing “Corsage”.

These are major decisions. Understandable on the one hand, because now there is no longer any presumption of innocence, and now everyone will wonder if the children with whom Teichtmeister plays – for example, in “Corsage” – have also become part of his perverted collages. On the other hand, they rob audiences of their maturity to expose themselves to the movies and the sad new truth behind them.

Marie Kreutzer says: “I am saddened and angry that a feminist film that more than 300 people from all over Europe have worked on for years has been so polluted and damaged by the horrific actions of one person. The extent to which videos and images of sexual violence against children are produced, distributed and consumed makes me even sadder and angrier.”

Teichtmeister emphasizes that he has not directly inflicted violence on anyone, but that his offense is purely “digital”. A strategy with which he hopes for a milder verdict.

On January 13, 2023, Austrian psychiatrist and court expert Dr. dr Gabriele Wörgötter in the ORF news program “ZIB 2”: “First of all, the statement of many consumers of child pornography ‘I just looked at it, I did nothing’ is a trivialization of the behavior and actually trivializes what it is about. Child pornography is a term that in itself is actually trivializing: any child pornographic image, i.e. any image of a child, in a sexually provocative, distorted context is itself abuse, and any consumer of a child pornographic video or image is watching an abused child. in that respect I would speak less of child pornography images than of images of abuse.”

Anyone who, like Teichtmeister, builds huge archives of these depictions of abuse from addictive behavior causes them to multiply. And for a need for supplies that must first be produced.

“Corsage” cannot be nominated for an Oscar on January 24. This is a pity. And the 43-year-old Teichtmeister shot his own career with all his might. This is tragic. But the real victims, writes the Süddeutsche Zeitung on January 15, “are not theaters and production companies, superiors and colleagues,” but the abused children of the dark web. No act of state, no “gesture of responsibility” can be big enough to warrant an apology.