The Incredible Case of L'Essentiel: Report on a French "Cult Case"

This CICNS report gathers first-person testimony from unnamed members of the small publishing venture at the centre of the “L’Essentiel” case, a French « affaire sectaire ». Speaking anonymously on camera, the witnesses recount the episode as they lived it: a dawn raid by sixty gendarmes, police custody, house arrest, frozen bank accounts and three years of interrogations which, by their account, rested on no complaint from any alleged victim. Olivier Manitara, the writer around whom the “cult” and “guru” labels in the case revolved, is mentioned only in the third person, and none of the speakers is named on-air. What they describe is how one French “cult case” was investigated, prosecuted and reported.

CICNS report. (English translation of the report published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 10 November 2006. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

[Voice]: It still took me four months to resurface, because after the police custody, I was completely shattered all the same. I believe she remained prostrate for a week; she no longer spoke. And then, little by little, things improved. And since she was pregnant, our daughter, who was born afterwards, suffered severe convulsions.

I was in an enormous depression afterwards. I was truly lost. If I had not had my belief in God, if I had not had prayer and all that, in my view, I would have killed myself. I say it frankly, because everything was collapsing around me. I felt they were on me even though I had nothing to reproach myself for, and I could not even explain myself.

[Voice]: At one point, they arrived and went down to all the houses below and asked everyone for their papers. I began to feel uneasy. Especially when they came to see me and told me: “Right, it’s simple: from now on you are going to have to give us information regularly about the people who come to live in the lodgings.” So I refused. And then they told me: “We will make your life hell — we have every power to make your life hell.” And there it was. And from that moment on, they began to watch us, to hide in the bushes, to make helicopter passes.

One day, at 6 in the morning — a quarter to 6 — they arrived. There were 60 gendarmes. They knocked. As I took a little while to answer, they came in screaming. I was in the kitchen; they trained a lamp on me, the pistol. I saw an enormous pistol and, screaming, they told me: “Don’t move, put your hands on your head,” or something like that. And they came up to me. My wife was there beside me. They held me at gunpoint like that in front of my wife, who was paralysed with fear. They struck me. They twisted my arm, put me on the ground, a pistol to my head. They were screaming. I could make out a helmeted man with a bulletproof vest. They knew very well — they had intelligence beforehand that we were not armed, that there was no weapon here. So there was no reason at all to do that.

They spoke to me only of religion, my beliefs. Did I believe in God? Did I pray?

So in the offices it was a frenzy. There was in particular a woman gendarme who was saying that what she wanted was all the papers of the cult. So she was searching everywhere; he was throwing all the papers everywhere.

[Voice]: At the time I was five months pregnant. They put me in a cell for three days, in conditions — well, I won’t go into it, because it was… Even a doctor came, because it was really… No hygiene, really eating [inaudible ?]. For several hours we spoke only of religion, my beliefs and all that.

But I must say that the gendarme who was questioning me — he came down a bit; things deflated a little. And by dint of talking with me, he began to have doubts. And I heard him say: “I wasn’t expecting this.” And he began to doubt, the gendarme. He wanted me to go along with them. If I went along with them, I faced nothing; I was a victim. So I would have walked out of there almost the same day, without harassment or anything, without prosecution. Whereas if I was not a victim of Olivier Manitara, then… I was an accomplice.

[Interviewer]: Was the gendarme responsible for your decision?

[Participant (company manager)]: So, she signed… I no longer know what it’s called… Well, at residence — confined to residence — where I no longer had the right to work, no longer the right to go out, and had to go and report to the gendarmerie three times.

So, no right to have any income, since on top of that they had in fact taken all the money I had in my handbag. They had frozen all my accounts — there you are. So they had made sure that things would go very badly afterwards. And so, having taken all that money, with all that impossibility of working since I was the manager of the company — so I had to give up the management — they had taken all the computers, they had taken everything; so for them, in their minds, it was clear: we shut down the activity. They had already won a point, that is to say, they had put us into dormancy, really.

[Voice]: There was France 3 — well, the journalists with their cameras and all that — in the judge’s office. And there I saw that there was a media angle to it, and I saw that they wanted to send me to prison to make a media story of it.

Then the prosecutor came down — the public prosecutor — screaming; there was screaming in the courthouse. And he was saying: “What on earth is this business? What are you doing?” And he did not agree at all; he was tearing into the investigating judge. He was shouting: they have done nothing, there is nothing to reproach them with. And the public prosecutor, in the end, opposed my going to prison, because there was nothing, in the end.

And so there was a conflict between them; it went on a good three quarters of an hour, with them insulting each other. And in the end she said: “I am not putting you in prison, but I am putting you in prison in your own home.” So she placed me under house arrest. She forbade me to write and forbade me to speak.

[Voice]: I had distributors; they were sent a dossier. “Watch out, it’s a « sec » [sic]” — they wanted nothing more to do with us. We had booksellers we work with. “Watch out, Manitara is a guru” — so they no longer wanted to work with us. So the gendarmerie laid out a whole trail so that everything would pull away from us. And people don’t try to find out. They don’t try to find out whether what they are given is true or not true. For them, from the moment it is put in front of their nose, for them it is true.

I asked the judge: in what way did I abuse people? What abuse of weakness did I commit? She was incapable of answering me. Even my lawyer told me that in his whole career he had never seen anything like it. In the end, for three years, they accused me of abuse of weakness. They put it in the newspapers. They were incapable of answering. What had I actually done, criminally? So, in the end, she told me: it is your lectures. You are reproached for the speeches you give in your lectures — the things I said in my lectures. There it is.

[Voice]: When they questioned us — they made us spend, I don’t know how long, eight or nine hours standing at the bar — they insulted us, and at one point I was even forced to shout in order to explain myself when I was being accused of something. In principle, you have a certain amount of time to answer the question. There, it was: you are accused of this. I would begin to speak, I would say four words. “Yes, but you are always trying to defend yourself. We know you are a cult. There is no point in proving anything.” So I explain to them that I have papers proving that I am innocent of what they accuse me of. “Yes, but that isn’t true.” Then, at that point, the lawyers intervene and say that this is outright discrimination and all that. And in fact, the whole interrogation was like that. That is to say, there were charges against us. As soon as we wanted to defend ourselves, the only way was to shout. So those who did not shout could not answer. And so the theme was: you are a cult. There is nothing more to say. It’s that — there you are — you are on file as that. And there are no excuses. You have no excuses for all your claims. All the charges — you have no excuses.

You should know that there was not a single complaint. Not one complainant. That even throughout the whole interrogation, there was not a single complaint. Nothing against us, in any case. Nothing that could support their statements or their accusations. None of that. Really nothing at all.

I saw girls, or people like that, saying in the newspapers — so they put it in writing — that they were asking for subsidies to have offices in the Aveyron, which they did not have, that they did not have enough resources. And they said that they had long been asking the prefects to destroy — those were the words — to destroy this publishing house. They had no complaint. All they had were the writings in the books. We had no tax audit, we had no problem with the administration, all that — there was no issue whatsoever on that score.

And as of today, then, in fact, they are accusing me merely of misuse of company assets, which is not proven at all. So, in fact, we have appealed against that. And the others are accused of defrauding the ASSEDIC.

Finally, then, the conclusion of all this: they spent an enormous fortune deploying 60 gendarmes, conducting three years of interrogation, helicopter overflights, interrogations all over France, with all our clients, the people who came to the courses — for nothing at all.

[Voice]: As for me, what I did afterwards is that I had to go and see all my neighbours, the people around us, the shopkeepers and so on, to ask things of them. I asked them to write me a paper saying: “Tell them that we have normal relations and that we are normal people.”