The Guéniot Affair and the Accusation of "Cult": CICNS on France 2's "Prise directe"

Dr Guéniot, a French physician, was accused of being the guru of a “cult” held responsible for the death of Evelyne, a young woman with breast cancer. He was convicted at first instance of failing to assist a person in danger, acquitted on appeal, and died a few months after the courts cleared him, at the end of what the CICNS (Centre d’Information et de Conseil des Nouvelles Spiritualités) calls fourteen years of media and anti-cult calumny. This short report examines how France 2 returned to the case in “Prise directe” on Tuesday 17 November 2009, presented by Béatrice Schönberg, and sets the accusations aired in the studio against what the courts had found. Letting them go out to nearly four million viewers without comment or moderation, CICNS argues, was not journalism but falsification.

CICNS report. (English translation of the report published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 6 December 2009. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

[Interviewer]: In a previous documentary, we commented on the affair of Dr Guéniot, the physician accused of being the guru of a cult held responsible for the death of Evelyne, whereas he was entirely cleared by the courts after 14 years of media and anti-cult abandonment. In particular, we analysed the disinformation that the book by Antoine Guélaud, deputy editorial director of TF1, constitutes as a whole, a book whose publication, though it came after the trial, nonetheless repeats only the prosecution’s theses. Here is how France 2 handles the subject in the programme “Prise directe” of Tuesday 17 November 2009, presented by Béatrice Schönberg.

[Participant] (the presenter, in the studio): Sometimes to the point of death. That was the case of your daughter Evelyne, who fell under the sway of a movement that preaches life after death.

[Interviewer]: To introduce the subject from this anti-cult angle, without setting it back in its historical and legal context, is a genuine falsification. Béatrice Schönberg acts as if there had not been a trial that explicitly rejected the anti-cult theses in this affair.

[Participant] (the presenter): Your daughter suffered from cancer, from breast cancer. She would die in terrible pain.

[Voice]: A trial.

[Participant] (the presenter): And she was under the sway of people who are men in white, that is to say, doctors.

[Voice]: The word does not fit.

[Voice]: Doctor? No. The two hours? Yes. The butchers? Yes. Yes.

[Voice]: They would take themselves for doctors? They would take themselves for doctors, because the white of criminals, yes.

[Interviewer]: Contrary to what one might understand here, Dr Guéniot, the primary target of these accusations, did not even follow the patient, and was therefore cleared by the courts and by the Order of Physicians. As for the other doctor, while he was convicted of failure to assist a person in danger, he was also left at liberty, and it is at the very best to call him a killer, a butcher and a criminal. While one can understand the grief and the accusatory drift of Evelyne’s mother, it is unacceptable to have let her express such accusations, without comment, without moderation, before nearly 4 million viewers.

[Voice] (the excerpt replayed): The two hours? Yes. The butchers? Yes.

[Interviewer]: Béatrice Schönberg seems in reality to be chiefly concerned with keeping her programme on track, even if it means forcing the line a little.

[Voice]: She was advised against by a friend, eh, that she was from the 7, eh, 4 hours. He was going to enter that cult.

[Interviewer]: That was not what Evelyne’s mother was saying. And it should be noted that Evelyne never joined the supposed cult. But it must have been written into the programme’s script.

[Participant] (the presenter): She entered that cult. Now, what I mean is that you… there were several trials.

[Participant] (the guest, Evelyne’s mother): Ah, it’s the 14th.

[Participant] (the presenter): 14 trials, you have…

[Participant] (the guest): We won 13 trials. The 14th, the criminal, he won.

[Interviewer]: We do not know what these figures correspond to. In any event, on the criminal side there was only one case and two trials. At first instance, Dr Guéniot was convicted of failure to assist a person in danger, and on appeal he was acquitted. Béatrice Schönberg, either totally ignorant of the facts, though that would already be a professional fault, to invite someone without informing oneself at least minimally about the context of the case, or solely concerned with making the intervention fit the programme’s Manichaean approach, lets her guest turn her studio into a popular tribunal where emotion stands in for evidence.

[Participant] (the guest): There was a 15th trial, the trial… [inaudible]

[Participant] (the presenter): What is that, the trial of the good Lord?

[Voice]: That is to say, he died of cancer?

[Voice]: The cancer that claimed to cure itself. She croaked.

[Interviewer]: The words are clear. This cruel epitaph for Dr Guéniot, who died a few months after being cleared by the courts and after 14 years of calumny, could have been avoided.

Once the partiality and disinformation contained in this sequence have been established, what value should be given to the other sequences the programme devoted to supposed cults? In each of these cases we find that the complaints come from individuals coping badly with a family rupture, reproaching adults of full age for life choices that fall perfectly within the law, until proven otherwise, and brought to the front of the media stage by the fact that the cult theme, so convenient these days, was invoked. In making this observation, we are in no way taking sides, nor prejudging the outcome of the legal proceedings under way, but we are pointing to a serious drift of journalism that sets itself up as judge and punishes by rumour.