Alternative medicine alert. This is the big black spot noted by the Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and the Fight against Sectarian Aberrations (Miviludes) in its report, the content of which we revealed to you on Wednesday 2 November. Some even end up in court. This is the case of the Mercuri case, named after Antonino Mercuri, an osteopath indicted for “abuse of weakness”, “tax evasion”, “fraud”, “laundering” and “illegal practice of medicine”. . Six women have filed a complaint against him, one of them testifies to franceinfo.
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The spiral began seven years ago, when Marie*’s companion made an appointment with the osteopath to treat knee pain. “When he comes back from this interviewshe says, he is completely overwhelmed. He is admiring. We feel that something has happened.”
Antonino Mercuri claims to have a gift of healer, which arouses Marie’s curiosity. It takes several months to get an appointment. “We are not in a context of osteopathy, we are in psychologyexplains Mary. He explains to me how my morphology is made in relation to my injuries. At this time, he really wanted to be the educator of my work and of my relationship as well. All questions of education in relation to our daughter also went through him.”
The young woman pays up to 11,000 euros, her companion much more, chaining the seminars offered by Antonino Mercuri abroad. Seminars costing several thousand euros. A year later, in 2016, Marie finds the strength to alert Miviludes and separates from her companion.
“In this kind of situation, only flight is possible. A person who is convinced that Mr. Mercuri is a good person, we cannot reason with him.”
Since then, Antonino Mercuri has been indicted. He spent four months in pre-trial detention. He is still under judicial supervision. His lawyer, Olivier Pardo, rejects everything that the victims accuse him of: “Mr. Mercuri’s patient base was about 3,000 patients. There are six who complain. There is a whole series of doctors who do not have as many patients. There is a rate of complaints which is superior.”
The difficulty in this type of case is to prove that there is a mental influence. This is the role of the unit for assistance and intervention in matters of sectarian aberrations (Caimades), the judicial police department responsible for this type of investigation. “We will have to demonstrate this influence through seduction, deconstruction and reconstruction.explains Claire Le Bras, head of Caimades. To do this, we carry out multiple auditions to draw a parallel with their life before and their life after.” Hearings increasingly related to cases of sectarian aberrations related to issues of health, well-being, and personal development. It is, at the moment, the bulk of the cases that this specialized service of the judicial police deals with.
*Assumed first name