Investigation into the ADFI, Part 2: The Victims of the ADFI

Investigation into the Associations for the Defence of the Family and the Individual (ADFI)

ADFI and UNADFI

Part 2: The victims of the ADFI

Read the first part of the dossier

A dossier from http://www.geocities.com/unadfi/p1.html

In March 2000, we lost a friend! Doctor Yves Jullien, an upright man who had decided to devote his life to the care of drug addicts and of people in psychological difficulty, took his own life, the victim of a destructive relentlessness. His only fault was to be a little different and perhaps even to be more effective than certain of his colleagues.

The parents and friends of Yves Julien have had to resign themselves. But after a year, during which we have accumulated information, we can say that Yves Julien was the victim of a campaign of harassment and hatred orchestrated by the UNADFI/ADFI (Union Nationale des ADFI/Association pour la Défense de la Famille et de l’Individu), a network of associations financed by the state to the tune of several million francs and, to crown it all, recognised as being of public utility (!).

The fact is that these associations, created originally to protect individuals and families from movements they accuse of being cults, rapidly experienced serious abuses. The UNADFI and the ADFI do not fight against so-called “cult” movements but against everything that is different and that presents an alternative to society as we know it. They have become a veritable parallel and dictatorial thought police.

Indeed, at first, following the death of our friend, we thought that the ADFI had itself also been a victim of the rumour. But the elements we have gathered since then demonstrate that the ADFIs are not on their first victim and that numerous individuals have seen their lives ruined, have killed themselves or have even been murdered following their campaigns or their activities.

We have tried to make this information known, but when we approached the administrations concerned so that the subsidies and the public-utility status of this association should be withdrawn from it, we received only a polite refusal which meant in substance that a few “slip-ups” were inevitable and that the various ministries and other foundations would continue to subsidise its activities.

That is quite simply intolerable!

We have consequently decided to devote all our free time to denouncing the activities of these poison-pen writers of the Republic and we demand that they be dissolved on account of the dangers they bring to bear on democracy.

This website is one of the means of action that we intend to undertake. We shall regularly publish the results of our investigations in these pages. In parallel, and if necessary, we intend to undertake a certain number of legal actions. But we need your support. This site is published in French and in English so that the many individuals and bodies concerned with individual freedoms throughout the world may know what the French State is financing to the tune of millions. You will also find at the end of this site the list of bodies to write to by post or by e-mail in order to demand the dissolution of this network of associations.

If you have knowledge of interesting facts or if you have been a victim of their activities, do not hesitate to send us your testimonies.

One last point. As very often, this type of organisation, intolerant by nature, bears criticism badly and resembles as two peas in a pod the associations it intends to combat. Anyone daring to denounce them immediately finds himself accused of being “part of a cult”, of being its “instrument”, becomes the object of a campaign of harassment in his professional or personal life and sees his life destroyed. If a journalist writes a negative article about them, he is immediately taken to court, not to mention the pressure received by his management from their political friends.

As some of us have already been the object of serious threats to their lives and to their own children by telephone, and as none of us wishes to see his life destroyed by campaigns of hateful rumour and to be ruined by repeated lawsuits (unlike them, we are not subsidised by the state), our group has decided to remain anonymous.

Case no. 1 – A suicide at the ADFI

As we asserted on our site’s home page, the ADFI, created at its origin by parents worried to see their children commit themselves to controversial religious movements, rapidly experienced serious abuses, certain of which have moreover never been revealed to the bodies which finance this organisation.

One of them is particularly significant because on the one hand a man died, but also because it dates from the beginning of 1982, in other words, in the first years of activity of this network of destructive associations. We collected it from a woman who had worked as a volunteer on the ADFI’s premises in Paris. Here is her testimony as we have reconstituted it.

In 1981, a young man decided to join the Association for the Unification of World Christianity. His parents, not sharing his choices, decided to approach the ADFI of Paris, where the headquarters of the national federation of the ADFIs was then located, at 4 rue Fléchier in the 4th arrondissement of Paris.

At that time, the ADFI was engaged in experiments which consisted in using psychological pressure aimed at forcibly de-converting an adherent of a movement, whatever it might be.

Ted Patrick, the inventor of these techniques, a former marine with rigorous methods and a self-proclaimed “psychologist”, advised kidnapping, the confinement of the individual for several months in a secret place so that he should be subjected to various psychological and physical pressures, sometimes even sexual or degrading ones (Ted Patrick recommended having sexual relations with the person or wiping oneself in front of the kidnapped person with the image of the God in whom the individual believed, for example). Most often, the person was kidnapped or lured into a trap, deprived of his freedom, physically manhandled, and underwent for weeks incessant discourse almost night and day destroying the beliefs to which he had adhered.

He entitled his method “deprograming” by reference to computers, whose memory it suffices to erase in order to be able to reprogram them “correctly”. And even if not all attempts ended in this “de-conversion”, it is easy to understand that few individuals subjected to this kind of technique are capable of resisting for very long. In fact, numerous were those who turned against their former movement, at least at first. So: no complaint, no trial.

When he met with a failure, Patrick was only rarely prosecuted, for he arranged for the parents themselves to carry out the illegal actions (such as the abduction and the detention) and the judges could not bring themselves to convict the victim’s relatives. It is moreover quite significant to note that the first custodial prison sentence that Ted Patrick received was for possession of cocaine.

Ted Patrick’s business was therefore flourishing (his sessions cost the family concerned several thousand dollars) and numerous were the former de-converted, or various imitators (crooked private detectives, etc.) who saw there an opportunity to make easy money.

In the nineteen-seventies and eighties an impressive number of abductions were carried out by Ted Patrick or by his followers in the United States but also in Europe. And the ADFI was implicated in a certain number in France, less than three years after its creation. We shall speak of this again in a future article. But to come back to our case, it should be known that invariably, the victims, once “deprogrammed”, were placed in a host family and supervised by an ADFI staff member charged with the “therapeutic follow-up” of the adherent. It was a matter of ensuring by means of various pressures that the freshly de-converted person remained well disposed.

The person was obliged to frequent the premises of the ADFI and the UNADFI in Paris in order to “bathe” in this ferociously militant atmosphere until the ADFI could consider that it could trust her. At that time, the persons charged with this “follow-up” were two ADFI staff members whose salaries were entirely financed by the Ministry of Health — Marie-Christine Cordon, the future wife of a famous follower of Ted Patrick in Canada, Ian Hayworth, and a certain Alexandra Schmidt, of American nationality.

One can well imagine the moral suffering undergone by a person subjected to this kind of continual pressure. Torn between his former beliefs, the pressure exerted by his family and the psychological techniques of harassment dispensed daily by the ADFI’s watchdogs, many cracked and subsequently experienced serious psychological problems whose cause was obviously attributed to the movement to which the ADFI was opposed.

At the beginning of 1982, the affair was nevertheless more serious. A young man, during this period, went to his parents’ home, took his father’s revolver, went to the ADFI’s premises, met his two watchdogs and, in front of them, shot himself in the head.

The affair caused no stir. Calling on its political friendships, the ADFI managed to hush up the affair and no judicial investigation was opened. Of course, responsibility for this butchery was attributed to “the cult” and a little also to fate. The police concluded that it was a simple suicide before witnesses and the case was closed. Not a word to the press and above all not a word to the Ministries which allocated the fat subsidies with which we are familiar.

By way of precaution, Marie-Christine Cordon and Alexandra Schmidt (the latter having been troubled some time previously in another “failed” deprogramming affair) were requested to make themselves forgotten and disappeared from circulation, going, the one to Canada and the other to the United States. It was the first time that the ADFI caused, to our knowledge, the death of a man. But it was unfortunately not the last, as we shall see!

The fact remains that the official bodies which finance the ADFI and which were paying, already at that time, this young man’s killers, can no longer now claim that they are unaware of these facts, which it is easy for them to verify, the affair having all the same left a few administrative traces that are easy to find. Will the ADFI’s political friendships still suffice to protect them?

Case no. 2 – The murder of Jean Richard Miguères

On Tuesday 28 July 1992, at Lyon in the Croix Rousse district, Roger Dorysse, a 62-year-old pensioner, coldly fires several rifle shots at Jean Richard Miguères. His victim collapses, hit in the legs. Roger Dorysse calmly returns to his car, reloads his gun and coldly finishes off his victim at point-blank range. He would give himself up to the police some time later.

Jean-Richard Miguères was the founder of a UFOlogist movement, the CEIRUS, based at Lyon, and the author of several books on the UFO phenomenon. He gave lectures throughout the world and had taken part in a few television programmes. He was Roger Dorysse’s son-in-law and the young couple had just moved into a district of Lyon. Miguères, after leading a fairly eventful life, seemed to have found a certain balance again with his young wife. An eccentric, without any doubt, but who had done nothing that deserved this atrocious death.

Except that the Dorysse couple are said to have been ardent militants of the ADFI-Lyon and that for this association, any group whose ideas are different is eminently suspect. The CEIRUS is said to have been catalogued there as a dangerous cult and, according to the statements of its president, this group was in the association’s “sights”. Moreover, as soon as the murder was revealed in the press, the president of the ADFI does not hesitate to condemn Jean Miguères by accusing him of being a dangerous and malevolent man without expressing the slightest condolences for his widow.

In the Figaro Lyon, a journalist revealed that “the Dorysses had come to know of Jean Miguères’s suspect activities when they were in contact with the Association pour la Défense de la Famille et de l’Individu.” Not so suspect at that, since the CEIRUS had never made itself talked about in the region and its activities were limited to the regular organisation of lectures on the subject of UFOs. But, in France, the ADFI is at once expert, prosecutor, policeman and judge, and it grants no possibility of appeal or means of defence. When one knows the end of this tragic story and the murderer’s cold determination, one does not ask oneself what type of information and fanaticising brainwashing the Dorysse spouses must have undergone at the ADFI. These accusations were subsequently denied by the local ADFI.

To judge of it, it suffices to read Madame Dorysse’s statements to the press: “My husband of course regrets his act, but he is totally relieved and serene. He did that with a single aim: to save our little girl from the clutches of this dangerous character”.

In this story the “defenders of the family and the individual”, subsidised by the State, made several victims: besides Jean Miguères, an entire family was totally destroyed and a quiet pensioner was transformed into a murderer and sentenced to 6 years’ imprisonment.

Case no. 3 – The ADFI protects a paedophile

The ADFI sometimes maintains strange alliances. Bernard Lempert is a psychotherapist specialising in the ill-treatment of children who founded an association which he called “l’Arbre au milieu”. What was his surprise when he noticed that his treatment centre was catalogued in the report on cults by the socialist deputy Guyard as a dangerous cult movement!

Once his investigation had been carried out, he learned that it was the ADFI Finistère which had communicated his name and that of his association to the commission and that his name appeared in a secret RG report. He then remembered that he had treated for anorexia the daughter of the founder of that ADFI, Anne-Marie Favé, the former Mayor of Plouerden. The young woman, once cured, decided to settle in the south of France to flee a more than possessive mother.

Of course, in the mind of the founder of that ADFI, Bernard Lempert became a dangerous “guru” who had kidnapped her daughter from her. L’Arbre au Milieu, a formidable cult which had to be the object of surveillance and be destroyed by every means. As is its habit, the ADFI made the maximum publicity about this “affair” and alerted the press.

An investigation by the Rennes public prosecutor’s office would even reveal that the rumour came on the one hand from the ADFI with the complicity of a journalist, Renaud Marhic, a member of ADFI Bretagne, but also from a man suspected of paedophilia who joined an association bringing together parents accused of the same offences, directed by a far-right militant!

It took Bernard Lempert more than two years to extinguish the “pyre” lit by the ADFI. But although he was totally cleared of any accusation by the courts, still today he continues to see his participation in conferences on childhood refused, despite his excellent professional reputation in social and judicial circles.

Case no. 4 – The ADFI’s political scheming

The following affair is exemplary in more than one respect. No one died, but this victim of the ADFI suffered several heart attacks.

A brilliant Geneva economist, André Poulin, was accused out of sheer malice and on the basis of a homonymy of being a member of the sadly famous Order of the Solar Temple. Of course, without any verification and fanaticised by her own theories, Janine Tavernier, the president of the UNADFI, wrote a text in which she formally accuses André Poulin of being a member of the OTS.

Next, she alerts Jacques Guyard, a former socialist deputy and rapporteur of the National Assembly’s commission on cults, spreading the rumour that “this member” of the OTS was also a secret financier of the RPR in contact with a Libyan arms dealer. The UNADFI, having friendships rather on the left, sees there a good opportunity to play both sides and to create a new “scandal” which it will be “interesting to exploit”.

Immediately, Jacques Guyard, who at that time was having some trouble with the courts, tells himself that being appointed at the head of a new commission on cults could restore his reputation. He writes a letter to Lionel Jospin and, without any further verification, explains that he is worried about the “continuation of the OTS’s commercial and financial activities” and hints that André Poulin and his father would indeed have links with a Libyan arms dealer and that an investigation into the OTS would not fail to bring about “political repercussions” (in other words, to raise a matter of RPR financing!). And he requests the creation of a commission charged with investigating the financing of “cult groupuscules”.

Quite obviously, André Poulin underwent a cascade of troubles of every kind. He had two severe cardiac alerts, had to devote much of his time and money to two lawsuits which he won against the author of the rumours and against the press, had to resign from several mandates in order to defend himself, has lived ever since in continual fear of finding himself suspected by his neighbours or business relations, etc.

In short, as his father, himself a victim of similar harassment, says: “It is appalling, my wife is having a serious nervous breakdown, my son is destroyed”.

It is only after dozens of telephone calls and once his defamation case had been won that Jacques Guyard and Janine Tavernier, under duress, had to admit their error. But the harm, motivated by dark political scheming, was done. Fortunately André Poulin was a solid man. Others have not had that luck…

Case no. 5 – The death of Yves Jullien

“Story of a rumour that kills”… it is under this title that the newspapers reported the Yves Jullien affair. On 6 March 2000, this doctor, married and the father of four children, took his own life following the closure of the centre for the treatment of drug addicts and psychotics that he had created at the château de l’Isle sur Serein.

At the origin of this rumour, the UNADFI, whose president admitted during a television programme by Mireille Dumas that she had personally confirmed by telephone that one of the directors of Doctor Jullien’s centre was a member of the “cult” Sri Sathya Sai Baba.

This rumour was carried for several years in the Yonne, and this despite the innumerable contrary testimonies from patients, collaborators, friends or the nurses and doctors who worked in this centre.

Alarmed by the ADFI, the social services and the police made life a veritable hell for the doctor and for this centre, to the point that it was closed by the DDASS, thus ruining years of effort. He could not bear it and took his own life. It is only at that moment that the public authorities understood that they had been misled by the rumour. A little too late.

The ADFI, for its part, two months after the tragedy, circulated a laconic note which speaks for itself: after having cited by name 3 individuals including Doctor Jullien’s widow, the ADFI still asserts “3 people who were officers of Sri Sathya Sai Baba, an association considered as a cult by the parliamentary Report on cults.

These people held directing responsibilities of Seve Epinoia (Yves Jullien’s centre) , an association placed under a measure of administrative closure, henceforth dissolved following the death of doctor Jullien.”

Read also: An impossible mediation? The tendentious psychology of the ADFIs

Read “The UNADFI and the merchants of hope”