Coke in the mattress: New details in the Teichtmeister child pornography case

A gram of cocaine costs 100 francs. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but on average 100 francs. 100 grams of cocaine costs 10,000 francs. On August 4, 2021, the Viennese police found 100 grams of cocaine in the mattress of actor Florian Teichtmeister.

Lina Paulitsch and Florian Klenk of the editors of the Viennese city magazine “Der Falter” had access to the files in the Teichtmeister case and today, Wednesday 18 January, extensively reported on the criminal prosecution.

It all started with an emergency call to the police for domestic violence from Teichtmeister’s partner at the time (and not yet an ex-girlfriend, as some media, including us, reported). She would also have informed the agents about the possession of child pornography material by Teichtmeister.

When the police rang the doorbell at Thurngasse in Alsergrund, they discovered that the actor was apparently under the influence of cocaine, which he did not deny at all. On the contrary, he leads the agents to his stock of mattresses, admits to being addicted to child pornography in addition to cocaine and hands the agents a data stick with recordings of an ‘unknown girl’.

“Four iPhones, nine DVDs, a MacBook, ten USB sticks, 16 memory cards, an iMac and 13 hard drives”, including a password, he hands over to the agents of the National Investigation Department, who knock on his door two days later. He immediately cooperates with the investigation against him, enters therapy, hires two lawyers, including the constitutional judge and the well-known lawyer Michael Rami, and regularly takes urine tests that do not find cocaine. Actually it is a full time job. He hides it from his private and professional environment.

His defense claims his cocaine addiction and professionally unstructured time during the pandemic has driven him into an increasingly uncontrolled craving for child pornography. Also in his CV, the defense presents cocaine addiction as the reason for child porn addiction. She hopes for a “distraction”, a “completion of the proceedings on conditions”: “No punishment is needed and no public trial is needed to prevent him from further crimes. Because : his actions “conspicuously contradict his other behavior,” writes the “Falter” Psychologists predict years of need for therapy.

But there will be no distractions. Firstly, the number of files found at Teichtmeister is overwhelming, secondly, the Austrian public prosecutor’s office must hold a public hearing in case of a sexual offense.

Surprisingly, the following points do not play a role for the public prosecutor in the February 8 trial against Teichtmeister: His cocaine possession, as he uses it for himself; there was no evidence of the alleged violence against his girlfriend, it is said; the collages he made while filming minors and provided with speech bubbles in which serious fantasies about sexual violence are expressed because the photos themselves are not pornographic in nature and therefore not criminally relevant, De Standaard reported on 17 January.

The 58,000 files are not examined by several officials, but only by data forensic scientist Karsten Theiner. For half a year, he clicks through the material with the help of an AI and finds “realistic, luridly distorted images of the genitals or pubic area of ​​minors, reduced to themselves and detached from other expressions of life, as well as sexual acts by and on consenting and minor persons”, the criminal indictment says according to “Falter”.

Already in the autumn of 2021, when the Austrian media reported anonymously and very hypothetically about the case (they had no access to the police file), the entire cultural scene knew who it was. The parents of a minor actress contacted the producers of the film “Serviam – I want to serve” about an elite Catholic boarding school for girls, in which Teichtmeister played a supporting role. They told him that Teichtmeister had photographed their daughter and demanded that he not approach her again.

Teichtmeister denied all allegations at the time because his ex wanted revenge on him. Everyone believed him. Nobody asked the ex and Burgtheater director Martin Kusej did not abuse the fact that – according to an employment lawyer in “Falter” – “in the event of such serious public accusations he could have had the police file handed over to him”. And that he should have suspended the actor until the matter was cleared up.

The Sisi movie “Corsage,” which is still an Austrian contender for the foreign Oscar and in which Teichtmeister plays Emperor Franz-Joseph, may be related to another predicament.

As the “Wiener Zeitung” reports, director Katharina Mückstein wrote on Instagram on June 18, 2022, before the grand premiere of “Corsage” in Vienna: “Tonight a perpetrator will stand on stage and be applauded. And we can do nothing there to put on.” Apart from Teichtmeister, not many men were on stage that night. And as Mückstein has claimed, her accusation was not against him, but against someone else.

The year before, he took part in a campaign by Austrian women’s shelters against toxic masculinity, writes the “Kleine Zeitung”. The campaign was soon stopped because too many allegations had been leveled against the actor. There are no proceedings against him.