The Spectre of the "Sect" in French Divorce Judgments: Three Mothers Testify

This CICNS documentary examines how the accusation of being “in a sect” entered French divorce and child-custody proceedings in the wake of the parliamentary reports on sects. Three divorced mothers — identified only by their first names, Christine, Marie-Christine and Anne-Marie — recount being accused by former spouses of endangering their children through their spiritual affiliations, and describe the police interviews, court-ordered social investigations and custody threats that followed. Their accounts are framed by three lawyers: the film opens with remarks by Maître Bernard Biro on the overall record of the French anti-sect policy, adds a note by Maître Philippe Pérollier on a 1981 Court of Cassation case, and includes the testimony of Christian Paturel, a former lawyer, on the role of ADFI files in divorce litigation. Together they document what the anti-sect climate France maintained from the 1990s onward could mean inside private family life.

CICNS documentary. (English translation of the documentary published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 10 June 2007. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation.)

[Biro]: The French policy of fighting against sects is the great hunt of the Tartarins. The lion has been hunted. The balance sheet is disastrous. We equipped ourselves with an enormous arsenal to run, like a Tartarin de Tarascon, after the wild beast that haunted the public forest. We found hardly any dangerous animals, and we produced disastrous effects in the population, notably that collective phobia which took hold of the country. Behind this collective phobia, a plethora of court cases that had nothing to do with it, such as divorces in which one side accused the other of being in a sect. That is the balance sheet — a totally disastrous balance sheet.

[Interviewer]: The edifying assessment of Maître Bernard Biro on the aberrations of the French anti-sect fight invites us to look concretely at what the intrusion of this psychosis into people’s private lives can mean. The accusation of being in a sect became commonplace in the wake of the climate of discrimination maintained for three decades, notably by means of the parliamentary reports of 1996 and 1999. These reports listed spiritual groups as dangerous without providing proof and without respecting the adversarial principle. They are deemed to be merely indicative and without legal force, but their power to do harm is very real, since they are systematically used by the authorities and cited as a reference in the media.

Three divorced mothers agreed to testify to the consequences of that decision when they found themselves accused of being in a sect. Christine has two children. She divorced after eight years of marriage. Some time before her marriage, she had committed herself to a spiritual path which was subsequently listed in the 1996 parliamentary report on sects. Eight years after their divorce, her ex-husband accuses her of being in a sect which he claims is dangerous for her son.

Marie-Christine has five sons, two of them minors. She wishes to divorce, against the life of her husband. Her children and her ex-spouse, through the ADFI, then accuse her of belonging to a movement presenting a sectarian risk, with possible consequences for the two minor children.

Some time after her divorce, Anne-Marie chose to follow a spiritual teaching which would also be listed in the 1996 parliamentary report on sects. Her two daughters take part episodically in children’s activity sessions within the association. Shortly after her new marriage, Anne-Marie received a complaint from her ex-husband, accusing her of being in a sect and of endangering the two girls.

Many spouses, during or after divorce proceedings, are confronted with this type of accusation. The so-called “Getliffe” affair, mediatised to excess, is a recent example. This young French woman accused her Canadian husband of being in a sect in order to obtain custody of their two children. While the French justice system quickly set aside the theory of sect membership, seeing in it only a painful personal matter, it has not always shown such lucidity in this type of situation, as Maître Philippe Pérollier testifies.

[Pérollier]: In 1981, the Court of Cassation upheld the ruling of a court of appeal. It concerned a petition for divorce. The court of appeal had said that, under the sway of her religious convictions, the wife, an adherent of a sect, imposed on those around her, and on her son in particular, a strange diet, and was not raising him according to the principles of the family’s religion. That is all. There is no question of behaviour that could be called dangerous, or at any rate blameworthy, in the context of a divorce. It is a question only of food and of conviction.

[Christine]: I had been divorced from my son’s father for eight years. I had custody of my son — normal shared custody. My son wanted to go back to his father. I let him go back to his father. After three years, he wanted to come back to me. His father did not like that. He decided to start proceedings. He brought proceedings and lodged a complaint with the district court, the children’s court, stipulating — and here I quote what is written in the judgment — that he had brought the matter before the children’s court “because of the danger represented, in his eyes, by the harmful influences of the child’s mother and of her circle, on account of the ties she maintains with a sect”.

[Marie-Christine]: Around 2001, I arrived in Marseille. I didn’t know anyone, so I wanted to meet people. I met a number of people involved in personal development with whom I had exchanges, which allowed me to take part in a study group on The Celestine Prophecy and to take part in various workshops, and above all to meet people with whom I felt a little more in harmony and with whom I could talk about spirituality, whereas until then I had not been able to talk about it at all.

It was also a period when I was beginning to feel better, so I was able to find in myself enough energy to ask my husband for a divorce, something I had wanted to do for years, but he was fiercely opposed to it and would not hear of it. He talked about it a great deal to my children, my eldest sons, who were adults, and they got it into their heads that I must be part of a sect. It was not possible that I should want to divorce of my own accord. It was unimaginable. Someone must have been filling my head. And that is when they decided to go and see the ADFI.

[Anne-Marie]: I met my current partner, who was going through a divorce. A year later, we got married, and we announced to everyone that we were going to get married. And of course, my ex-partner was informed by my children. And then, suddenly, there was a very sharp reaction, with a reaction of verbal aggression over the telephone. He intruded into our world, into this new current. A couple had been formed. And very shortly afterwards, we received letters from lawyers saying that we belonged to a sect — a formal complaint accusing me of being part of a sect and of taking the children into it, and saying that it was dangerous for the children.

[Christine]: The judge, after the hearing, ruled that there was no case to answer. He considered that there was no danger, that I did not appear to be in a dangerous sectarian movement such as had been mentioned by his father. He knew very well that in cases of conflict between parents, when there are children, this is one of the favourite themes chosen in order to win one’s case. I really appreciated the judge’s approach, because he was extremely neutral and extremely vigilant on this point.

So after the children’s court’s ruling that there was no case to answer, my husband, who was obviously not satisfied with that decision, did not leave it there. He wrote to the public prosecutor; he lodged a complaint with the public prosecutor, sending him a letter explaining, for the same reasons, that he was worried about his son’s future, because his mother was in a sect. And one day, to my surprise, I received a summons to the police station where I live.

[Marie-Christine]: The ADFI told them: you don’t realise — there is now a new type of sect in existence. It’s the whole New Age movement. So these people create networks of associations that are interconnected with one another. So it is much more subtle than the big organised systems. So it is much vaguer, more subtle. And so the aim is to get people to come on a course, to feel bad, and then they are caught like that, they are kept for years, and all their money is pumped out of them.

Since I had come to know people, this association, I went out more, I had more activities outside the home. Well, it seems that on the ADFI’s list, meeting people, having exchanges, holding meetings implies that you are part of the group. So the ADFI played on paranoia, on fear: you don’t realise — your mother, she is not really a sect in which she risks meeting extremely dangerous people. So she can be drawn into a sect. So she can draw in your two little brothers — that is, my two youngest children, who were minors. And at that point, getting them out of there will be impossible. So, to avoid all that, as a preventive measure, it is better to take custody of the children away from her.

[Christine]: I was in a very bad way, very very bad. I found myself in an office, like in the films, behind a table with a man typing on his machine. A tiny room, with nothing on the walls. One or two people who came in and went out several times, listening to me, looking at me like that, like a strange animal, asking me a question, leaving again, coming back in an extremely — I don’t know — irritated, exasperated manner. One person arrived, leaned back against the wall with a very imposing air, and began to ask me questions. He asked me how I earned my living, how I ate, whom I associated with, how I looked after my health, whether I took medication, whether I took drugs.

And at one point, another person arrived, very very exasperated, very irritated. He was looking for his cigarettes — or his lighters, or I don’t know what. And then he starts saying to me: yes, but you know, people like you, who are in sects — we know, they all function the same way, we know them, we’re used to it. Inside myself, I said: but you have nothing to reproach yourself with. You are not a murderer, you are not a criminal, you have stolen nothing. So I put myself in a position, really, not of defensiveness — because I really sensed that that was not the thing to do — but on the contrary completely, as they say, zen. In a position where I have nothing to reproach myself with.

[Anne-Marie]: There were two investigations. There was one investigation concerning the children alone, with a person who came to collect the girls and had interviews with the girls. Without us. And then another person, another investigation: a person who came into the family, who questioned us — my current partner alone, me, the girls — the environment, everyone, the school, all the places the girls went to. The investigation showed that the girls were in no danger in this spiritual movement, and that they were well brought up, in good conditions; the psychological and emotional climate, everything was fine as far as the competent authorities were concerned. The outcome was that there was no problem: the children had suffered no harm from their parents’ membership of this movement, or even from their own episodic participation in it. But in order to give their father psychological peace of mind, it was nevertheless decided that they would no longer have the right to take part in these activities.

[Christine]: My husband was not calmed at all, because for him it had to go much further; he was very virulent. After the hearing at the police station, there was to be a social investigation, since it was the police officers who told me so. They said: there is going to be a social investigation about you; we are going to make enquiries with your neighbours, your friends, I don’t know, employers, doctors, social workers, and so on.

I had no feedback at all from that social investigation, so did it take place or not? I suppose so, since there was afterwards a summons to the court. A summons to the court is not a trivial thing: you are laid bare, in fact. You are asked everything about your life, and enquiries are made among the people around you.

[Marie-Christine]: The ADFI recommended to my husband a lawyer in Aix-en-Provence, a lawyer who had an enormous tome marked “anti-sect fight”. A divorce on grounds of fault had to be brought in order to take the children away from me. This lawyer said that this was the normal procedure in such cases. The file was going to be put together in such a way that I would not be able to get out of it. The aim, then, was to place me under guardianship. In fact, an unofficial guardianship — to infantilise me, to treat me as an irresponsible person, incapable of understanding her own actions.

[Interviewer]: The situation experienced by Marie-Christine is not rare. Let us listen to Christian Paturel, a former lawyer, testify to his experience of anti-sect lobbying in the courts, and to the influence of that lobbying on the conduct of certain social investigations.

[Paturel]: Divorce and child-custody proceedings: you would see ADFI files appearing in the proceedings — quite substantial files, since they were files about this thick — which were handed to the opposing lawyer so as to feed the debate, by showing that the person had changed religion by joining a sect. I have even seen colleagues who — very discourteously, in terms of the code of professional ethics — would hand this file to the family-affairs judge, matrimonial at the time, just as I was walking away, that is, once the hearing was over: on the way out, it would be left there like a little violet gift, with the words: here, have a glance at this. In divorces, there were three parties to the divorce: the husband, the wife and the ADFI. And it’s true, it was a three-way divorce. Three-way marriages — it was a three-way divorce. Systematically, the ADFI appeared. It did not appear as a party, but it fed the case. I have had files, all the same, where we could have moved towards a joint divorce, which suddenly flared up, turning contentious — you should see it — even into trench warfare. And this is what is called an association for the defence of the family and the individual, for the peace of the family, social peace. Bravo — there are better, there are better examples of the kind.

Then, I remember that social-investigation report which is absolutely monstrous, because a mother who has been abandoned, who finds a job again, who is raising her two children, getting them to school, who really, in all dignity — good school results, no criminality on the part of the children, even though she belonged to a religious minority (you see how the prejudices are totally false) — is blackened the way she was blackened. There was nothing. There was not even one per cent of good in it for this woman. In other words, the social investigator had completely gone off the rails. And there, the presiding judge stopped me immediately. She said to me: listen, Monsieur Paturel, I am stopping you right away. Do not waste your time on the social-investigation report. We take no account of it. For us, it has no value. So, of her own accord, she set aside that social-investigation report, considering that it was a monstrous report which does not correspond to the truth at all. Which any judge has the right to do: a judge is not bound by an expert opinion or a social investigation. Justice — it is the judge who renders it. Not the social investigator. Not the expert. So there you have the very example of open-minded magistrates, who were not subjected to any pressure at all from the ADFI or from a social investigator, and who, with their own discernment, know how to weigh things up and to exclude from the proceedings documents that have absolutely no place in them, that are absolutely shameful and that are counter-truths.

[Anne-Marie]: That word — it is a word, even if you do not really know its meaning, it is a word that brutalises, because it sits in the collective unconscious like a word… It is like a weapon. It is like a weapon. It is a word that wounds, that destroys. Using that word, already, was… for me, it was like… I don’t know, like putting me into a world of madness, of lost people. When it was completely the opposite of what I was living.

In the end, it was the girls who were a little bit punished in this story, because they… they had discovered these activities. It was later that they understood that it was to settle an emotional problem.

[Voice]: If I am in a sect, then everyone is in a sect. Because for me, football clubs are a sect. The Catholic religion is a sect. The Vatican is a sect. The national education system is a sect. In any case, I do not have the feeling of being in a sect. I have a completely normal life. I work. I sleep. I eat. I am not indoctrinated. My money is not being taken — because that is often the thing that gets put forward, that my money is being taken. My money is not being taken.

[Christine]: The approach I took afterwards was above all to protect my son, because it shook him too, finding himself confronted with it. He was 14, 15 years old. He was not an adult. He did not understand it well. He did not see the problem. He did not see the harm. For him, there was no problem, because we talked about it together. The reaction I had was that afterwards, I told myself I was forgetting all of it. I erase it from my memory. I continue on my way. I try to survive, and above all not to make my relations with my son’s father, and with my son, any worse.

[Marie-Christine]: For me, it was a real nightmare. Fortunately, at that time, I had a lot of friends. At one point I really felt that I was going to crack, that I was on the edge of madness. Fortunately — there was really one day in particular when I felt that on that day, if there had not been someone there beside me, someone I could talk to, who would hold my hand, I was going mad. Fortunately, I found that person.

The ADFI, which claims to be an association for helping the family and the individual, in fact pushed towards the destruction of a family and incited aggression and hatred. On the pretext of love, all the values of tolerance, of respect for others, of listening are swept aside, and people are attacked, dragged lower than the ground and destroyed. What I find serious in this kind of thing is above all this: someone who had perhaps been psychologically weaker — I do not know where they would be today. Me, now, I feel that it has blown apart. I cannot manage to have normal relations with my eldest children. Yes, I still hold what they did against them, but in a way, they were so afraid that I was being taken in… It is they who were taken in.

[Interviewer]: For these three mothers, the conflicts were in the end resolved amicably. Anne-Marie and her two daughters accepted the judge’s decision without bitterness. Later, one of her daughters would choose to join the spiritual movement, left a few years earlier. Christine’s son chose to go back to live with his father, which put an end to the judicial proceedings. Marie-Christine drew up an amicable divorce agreement with her husband, the latter having realised that he was being drawn too far by his lawyer. Whether the wounds have closed or not, each of them wished to testify to the absurdity of the sect-hunt as it is practised in France.

[Voice]: Accusing is easy. It saddens me when I see that in political circles, philosophical circles, psychological circles, whatever you like, everything that exists in this world — and yet we have the tools — we are still, for the most part, telling ourselves that it is on the other side that things are wrong.

[Marie-Christine]: Nowadays, to hurt someone in a divorce, people no longer quite know what to use: they use sects or paedophilia. And besides, my husband, afterwards, took it up with me again — that indeed he wanted to take revenge on me. So, in fact, we are no longer at all… well, it has nothing to do with spirituality or a sect, nothing at all. It has to do with people who are… I am being judgmental here, but I saw paranoia in front of me, and they made my children paranoid — that is, afraid of everything. Which means that now, straight away, they will see it in a bad light, and I will be accused again.

[Voice]: France is indoctrinated, and people are being brainwashed by being told: there are sects in France, beware, it’s dangerous. And that is so easy. Any person who follows a movement or something, or an ideology that is not the norm, in quotation marks — that’s it, they are someone dangerous, someone to be wary of, someone not to be approached, because you never know, you can be indoctrinated, shut up inside a movement and never get out of it. That is what I want to testify against today. It is this ease with which, in France, this subject of “you are in a sect” is now used to pigeonhole everyone. Any reason will do. Any reason will do now.