Maureen Kearney was brushing her teeth in the bathroom of her home outside Paris on the morning of December 17th, 2012, when a man pulled a knit cap over her head, sealed her mouth with gaffer tape and dragged her to the basement.
Her assailant carved a capital A on Kearney’s stomach, pushed her on to a chair, taped her wrists behind her back and bound her ankles to the chair legs. Then he shoved the handle of the knife into her vagina. Hours passed before Kearney was discovered, in shock and moaning with pain, by her cleaning lady.
Kearney was a whistleblower. That autumn she had denounced a secret deal between executives at the French companies Areva and EDF – respectively the builders of nuclear power plants and the main French electricity company – and China Guangdong Nuclear Power Company.
Kearney believed the deal constituted a dangerous transfer of French technology to China and threatened tens of thousands of jobs at Areva, where she was a representative for France’s largest trade union, the centre-left CFDT.
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The brutal attack was the beginning of a six-year nightmare during which Kearney was convicted of having fabricated the assault, then ultimately cleared. The people who nearly destroyed her life were never punished.
This true story of apparent treachery at the highest levels of the French nuclear industry has been made into a film, La Syndicaliste (The Trade Unionist), directed by Jean-Paul Salomé and starring Isabelle Huppert as Kearney.
A year before her ordeal began, Kearney had been instrumental in blocking a similar agreement. Negotiations between the French and Chinese continued in secret, and Kearney received a copy of the draft agreement anonymously through the post. She went public with a photograph of the heads of Areva and EDF at a signing ceremony with the Chinese. French media confirmed the story of the secret contract 10 days after Kearney was attacked.
Kearney was born in Castlebar, Co Mayo, in 1956. She met her husband, Gilles Hugo, on a holiday in the 1980s and moved to France to live with him. Areva hired her to train engineers and corporate executives who were about to be posted abroad.
“At one stage in the 1990s I started having students breaking down in class, very upset and very emotional,” Kearney says. “I tried to find out what was going on, and I discovered there were a lot of lay-offs.” That prompted her to become a trade-union activist.
About three weeks after the December 2012 attack, Kearney’s status flipped from victim to suspect. She and Hugo were taken to a police station and put in separate rooms. She was questioned for 10 hours, without food or drink and in severe pain because of a shoulder injury predating the attack. Her interrogators, all men, refused to give her even a paracetamol. When she went to the toilet she had to leave the door open. “It was total humiliation and intimidation,” she says.
“I was left on my own in an office. This guy comes in and says, ‘I don’t like people like you. Either you say you invented everything or we will make sure your family will never recover.’ I immediately thought of my daughter and granddaughter. I was prepared to say I was Jack the Ripper if it could protect them.”
The prosecution at Kearney’s trial used the fact that she read detective novels and had once attempted to take her own life to cast doubt on her judgment. “The fact that I didn’t wear panties under my tights was said and resaid all the time,” she says, “as if there was something not quite normal or respectable about me. It was terrible.”
Grotesquely, a gynaecologist testified that Kearney’s body should have expulsed the knife handle stuck in her vagina. She was forced to undergo at least three gynaecological examinations by male doctors, including a re-enactment of the attack in which she was bound to a chair and a speculum was pushed inside her. “I was crying. I was hysterical. I didn’t want it to be done ... It was another rape,” she says.
The biggest difference between the character played by Huppert and herself, Kearney says, is that “I was like a zombie for a long time, whereas she is get-up-and-go. I didn’t have it in me at the time.”
Kearney appealed against her conviction immediately. Six years passed before she was cleared in the second trial. During those years she rarely slept more than 90 minutes at a time because she was woken by nightmares. Her weight dropped from 55kg to 43kg – or from 8st 9lb to 6st 11lb. “There were times when I felt my body did not belong to me,” she says. “I used to say to my friends, ‘You could take my brain and put it in a jar on the shelf and I don’t think it would feel any different to having my brain in my body.’”
La Syndicaliste is almost two films. In the first part the viewer is gradually drawn towards the authorities’ view of Kearney as a mythomaniac who staged the attack. Why did she not see her assailant in the mirror? Why were only three sets of DNA – her husband’s, Kearney’s and the housekeeper’s – found in the house? Why did the attacker use a knife and tape from the house rather than bring his own weapons?
Huppert’s tough surface begins to crack under interrogation. She says she had the impression that her entrails were spilling out of her stomach on to her knees. If a stranger cut into your stomach with a knife, if your hands and feet were bound and you could not see, you might think the same thing.
In testimony at the second trial, it emerged that Kearney could not possibly have taped her own hands behind her back because she had severed tendons in her right shoulder in a recent fall. Indeed, she was to have had a pre-surgery MRI scan on the day of the attack. The alleged DNA report had been mysteriously misplaced by police. A military psychiatrist specialising in trauma testified on Kearney’s behalf that he had no doubt she had been viciously attacked.
One of the most important pieces of evidence was unearthed by the journalist Caroline Michel-Aguirre of L’Obs magazine, who wrote the book on which La Syndicaliste is based.
Michel-Aguirre learned that a second woman, Marie-Lorraine Boquet, had been the victim of an almost identical attack. Bocquet was then married to a whistleblower from Veolia, the water, waste-management and energy-services company. “She was not believed for 17 years,” Kearney says. “She too was told she was crazy.”
The files on Kearney’s and Boquet’s cases have disappeared. Kearney says she has been told the names of people – highly placed people in state-owned companies – who ordered the attack on her. She will say no more than that because she is afraid.
One is torn between shock and incredulity, between thinking that Kearney’s ordeal could not possibly have happened and being appalled that it occurred in a western democracy in the 21st century.
Clémentine Autain, a parliamentary deputy with the far-left party France Unbowed, has initiated an inquiry in the National Assembly into the dysfunction of the judiciary and police systems in the cases of Kearney and Boquet.
Kearney had to leave a private screening of the film last autumn. “When you see six years of your life condensed into two hours ... I just couldn’t take it,” she says. She did breathing exercises and returned to the screening room because she was worried about her daughter.
Kearney says she has lost faith in French institutions, but she still believes in French people. More than 400 colleagues at Areva wrote to express their support. The CFDT paid all her legal fees. “There was a chain of solidarity. Looking back, that was really, really beautiful,” she says.
Kearney’s husband and friends “jumped for joy” when she won in the appeals court. “I did not. I said, ‘I am destroyed, totally destroyed.’ That’s when the reconstruction started.”
Less than 1 per cent of rapes and attempted rapes in France lead to a conviction, according to the statistics institute Insee. Kearney now works with women who have been the victims of violence. “We get them to talk about what they have been through and, if they can, write it down. If they cannot, they dictate it to me, and I write it down for them. The first thing we tell them is: ‘We believe you.’ That is so important to hear ...
“The message I try to get across is that you can get through things,” Kearney continues. “There is a lot of pain, but if you keep moving forward you can come out the other side. You will never be the same person again, but you can have a good life. I am now able again to appreciate the good things in life, whereas for six years I could not.”
La Syndicaliste opens in selected cinemas on Friday, June 30th
