"They Did Not Save My Life", a Scandalous Anti-Cult Docu-Fiction

“They Did Not Save My Life”, a Scandalous Anti-Cult Docu-Fiction

A reading report on the book by Antoine Guélaud, deputy director of the TF1 newsroom: “Ils ne m’ont pas sauvé la vie” - Toucan/TF1 Entreprises, 2009

An extract from the chapter in which the author describes what drove him to write this book (he is speaking of Evelyne Marsaleix, who died of cancer): “our first and last meeting overwhelmed me, haunted me, leaving me a strange sensation, never felt before.” and “your freckles, your feline gaze at once so determined and gentle. Everything about you troubles me and makes me sway. Instantly, listening to you, I identify with you, I want to carry your combat and pursue it post-scriptum and post mortem. I feel the irrepressible need to substitute myself for you.”.

The book’s summary on the back cover: “My name is Evelyne M. Fate placed on my path doctors who were followers of a healing cult. I never recovered from it: a breast cancer carried me off in a few months”. The broad lines are laid down: it is not Evelyne who writes but Antoine Guélaud, even if the narration might suggest the contrary. From there, every amalgam is permitted.

The doctors in question are named in the book: they are Doctors Guéniot and Saint-Omer, the latter being Evelyne’s treating physician, but it is the former, supposed to have manipulated the latter, who is one of the work’s principal targets. The novel’s scenario takes shape page by page: a group of people, at the centre of which Gérard Guéniot is said to stand, is supposed to have knowingly led Evelyne to her death, in the name of a spiritual belief (reincarnation).

We took the trouble to read the 80 pages of the record of the appeal trial of what the press wrongly presented as “the Guéniot affair”. A trial which concluded with the acquittal of Doctor Guéniot and the rejection of the claims of the UNADFI (the leading anti-cult association and the true pillar of the complaint brought before the courts) and of Evelyne’s family, who asked that a “cultic” context be taken into account, in the name of which they sought the conviction of the two doctors for involuntary homicide. It is therefore flagrant that the author of this denunciatory book disregards this decision of the courts and, without underlining it clearly enough, develops a personal thesis against the current.

Evelyne speaks to the reader directly, “from up above” where “she sees everything”. Antoine Guélaud writes in the first person in the name of Evelyne, now deceased. This artificial position of the pen is an undeniable advantage for the author. The author, the first witness of the events, speaks to you from the beyond. Guélaud takes the opportunity in passing to throw a few flowers at himself, and at his profession, by having Evelyne speak of a journalist from the “renowned magazine, Le Droit de savoir” who, with his report, is said to have “suddenly woken (…) the police, the Justice system, the council of the order of physicians (…) At last! The fourth estate doubtless deserves its name. It is sometimes even the first.”

And yet one must understand that Evelyne wrote nothing, nor even dictated anything herself. The intimate diary which appears episodically in the work is another invention of the journalist’s. Finally, Evelyne comments with authority on events subsequent to her death.

The findings of the Douai court teach us that the real Evelyne “would express herself in writing or orally in a manner that would evolve according to the chronology of the investigation, in parallel with that of her cancer, and according to the period and the interlocutor, especially as regards the role she would attribute to Gérard Guéniot”. One can also read there that it is “particularly apparent that, before the phase of a posteriori reconstruction (…) Évelyne Marsaleix, while giving, from the first phase, a detailed account of the events of which she was the first and only permanent witness, mentions at first (…) only Michel Saint-Omer, to the exclusion of Gérard Guéniot”. It is likewise reported (p. 63 of the hearing record) that during an interrogation by Doctor Abgrall (an expert appointed by the Court and a notorious “anti-cult” figure), a few days before her death, Evelyne had to correct propositions of the (prosecution-minded) expert which attributed to Doctor Guéniot “words, acts or writings” of Doctor Saint-Omer.

None of this, of course, appears in Antoine Guélaud’s tale, which relies essentially on Evelyne’s statements and supposed statements to express his clearly anti-cult thinking: “I want to understand how you could fall under the spell of these zealous cult followers, bearers of an extravagant mystical and irrational certainty that is an insult to Descartes”. He also has Evelyne launch this vibrant warning to the reader: “Do not cross the yellow line of the irrational, you would lose yourself there”.

It is just as shocking to see how Antoine Guélaud sweeps aside the findings of the trial and its conclusions: there again by usurping an identity, that of Justice herself. He begins that chapter thus: “I am justice, the one everyone knows, not her blindfolded face”, and ends with: “In the balance there is on one side a purely legal assessment and on the other a human situation”.

Antoine Guélaud asks many good questions in this book, but he does so without really answering them, even when they concern him first and foremost (the procedure known in rhetoric as prolepsis 1). As if the fact of having asked them, anticipating the objections that might be made to his work, released him from all introspection and responsibility.

We shall, on his behalf, answer the one that is perhaps the most essential, p. 22: “Journalism and injustice, the eternal theme forever unfinished. How far can one go in identifying with the subject of one’s report?

Answer: up to the point where it causes harm to others. If Antoine Guélaud is conscious of having identified with one party to a conflict, he knows he has lost his objectivity. The best course is then not to express oneself before having taken the necessary distance, or to express oneself in one’s own name, but without passing off one’s partisan opinions as objective testimony under cover of a humanist mission and in the name of a “right to know”. Moreover, such a tale ought to be published as a “simple citizen” engaged in a personal fight, and not as a professional French journalist who is a signatory of a charter in which one can read:

-holds calumny, accusations without proof, the alteration of documents, the distortion of facts and lying to be the gravest professional faults;

-holds scruple and the concern for justice to be primary rules;

-does not confuse his role with that of the policeman.

-does not use the freedom of the press with a self-interested intention;

And, on the subject of the hidden camera which Antoine Guélaud abused:

-forbids himself to invoke an imaginary title or capacity, to use disloyal means to obtain information or to catch anyone’s good faith by surprise; (source)

The CICNS wishes to underline the indecency of this publication, which produces nothing positive, resting as it does on an extremely subjective and partial vision of the facts (the quasi-sentimental tonality of Mr Guélaud’s words makes his testimony particularly biased in a supposed search for truth), it works the vilest springs of instrumentalised emotion, disregarding a “ruling” of Justice which the author could profitably have taken at its word, to reflect for a moment on the motivations and consequences of his writings, or more radically to cease, after a “ruling of Justice”, to keep up the vain cycle of unsupported accusations and personal vengeances. But it is frequently observed that all these elements weigh little in the balance when the occasion presents itself to publish a book on a potentially saleable subject.

To note: By a judgment dated 21 October 2009, the Paris tribunal de grande instance convicted the publication director of the magazine Marianne for having published an article entitled “the trial of a guru” containing defamatory statements against Gérard Guéniot, who had been definitively acquitted by the Douai court of appeal in February 2009.

See our video report on the Guéniot affair (November 2009) > ADSL 56k

Read Jean-Luc Martin-Lagardette’s point of view on this book “A brilliant but fallacious charge against the cults”

Read our article on the Guéniot affair

1:

Considered an argumentative figure, it consists in going ahead of the interlocutor’s objections by first stating the thesis he might maintain, the better to eliminate or refute it before the adversary even speaks of it. Source