A convicted British con man who featured in a Netflix documentary was sentenced on Thursday to six years in prison by a French court for running over and injuring two police officers while trying to escape.
Robert Hendy-Freegard, also known as David Hendy, is the central figure in the documentary The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman and the fictional film Rogue Agent, both available on Netflix.
In 2005, a London court had sentenced Hendy-Freegard to life in prison for kidnapping, deception and stealing from students and women – from whom he took more than £1 million (US$1.24 million at current exchange rates) – while posing as a spy for MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence service.
But he was freed in 2009 after an appeal court overturned his conviction for kidnapping on the grounds that there had been no physical constraint.
Coercive behaviour in an intimate setting, or psychological manipulation, was not a crime in British law at the time.
More than a decade later, Hendy-Freegard, now 53, appeared in court on Thursday for running over and injuring two police officers in central France’s sparsely populated Creuse region in August 2022.