Autopsy of Michel Brûlé by India Desjardins

“What kind of life do you have to have lived for people not to believe you’re dead?” »

That’s the question India Desjardins asks at the start of her podcast Fall: Michel Brûlé offered on Radio-Canada’s Ohdio platform. The author of the hit series Aurélie Laflamme’s diary has devoted the last year to this project and conducted dozens of interviews to arrive at this fascinating podcast of six episodes which is a sort of autopsy of his relationship with the one who was his editor: Michel Brûlé.

This is the first time she has dared to speak about it publicly. “Exploring the life of Michel Brûlé has become a pretext for analyzing a situation that raises for me social questions that interest me,” she says. Abuse of power, for example. »

The podcast show To fall comes out exactly one year after the death, in a bicycle accident in Brazil, of the publisher Michel Brûlé, founder of the house Les Intouchables. In October 2020, he was convicted of sexual assault after a trial. The Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP) had requested formal proof of death, which was done with the help of Interpol agents, so that there could be a halt in the judicial process.

It was the bizarre end point of a life that was incredible to say the least.

When I heard the news of his death, one of the first people I wrote to was India Desjardins. It was in our exchanges that I saw the birth of his podcast project. She was in the best position to talk about Michel Brûlé in depth.

Why ? In 2013, I covered the Rencontres québécoises en Haïti organized by Rodney Saint-Éloi, where some twenty Quebec writers traveled to Port-au-Prince. Among them, India Desjardins. During this trip, India told me to experience very difficult things with her editor Michel Brûlé. What she was telling me was, in my opinion, harassment. I was ready to write an article about his situation. But she wasn’t ready, and I respected her silence.

Nearly 10 years later, I understood why by listening to his podcast. She was too afraid of Michel Brûlé.

“According to journalistic standards and practices, you or another journalist would have had to have his point of view, and he would have been extremely harsh on me,” she explains. People would have believed it, I would have found myself in a public battle. I don’t think I would have won. He played in my head, he lied, he made things up, it was hard to live with. In Haiti, I was already at my wit’s end. And after that, there was the refereeing, and that completely knocked me out. »

The battle for Aurélie

In Fall: Michel Brûléwe feel that India Desjardins wants to validate its impressions with several specialists – psychologist, judge, lawyer – and people who knew Michel Brûlé – including Bryan Perro, Ghislain Taschereau and MC Gilles –, in addition to giving the floor to Jill Côté, who filed the sexual assault complaint against him. India Desjardins wants to understand what happened to her, and her show is not about teardown or revenge. She wants to bring the debate elsewhere than on her specific case. So much so that it is an instructive and nuanced portrait of the power relations in the world of publishing that we discover.

“I wanted to show that it’s not all black or all white,” she explains. There are people who still love him, including his family, to whom [la balado] going to cause pain, and there are people who still suffer from his behavior. You can’t do a show like that without flaying one person or another. My goal is not to hit on a person who is dead. I’ve come to terms with my anger over what happened, and I’m able now to have affection for the beautiful things that happened too. »

India Desjardins describes the complexity of this relationship very well. First, she never experienced any sexual assault from Michel Brûlé, the first publisher who believed in her as an author when everyone had refused her manuscript.

My colleague Nathalie Petrowski had moreover described the publishing house Les Intouchables as “the Bonneau Welcome Center” for authors to whom we closed the doors.

Michel Brûlé hasn’t hesitated to invest in children’s series which have been hugely successful, such as The Diary of Aurélie Laflamme and Amos Daragon. Millions of copies sold. Locomotives. When India Desjardins and Bryan Perro withdrew their marbles from the Intouchables, they woke up the beast, I have the impression. “Yes, because when we took away our books, we took away her biggest income, notes India Desjardins. And what gave him power was his income. »

She recalls that the young Michel Brûlé, very left-wing at the beginning of his career, jostled and disturbed the literary world with his methods which gave results. Without forgetting a lot of sometimes avant-garde, sometimes strange projects. like his movie Caidowhich means “to fall” in Spanish…

In fact, India Desjardins got along pretty well with her publisher until her litigation, and we understand that she still feels indebted to Michel Brûlé, like Bryan Perro. Both feel like they contributed to his success, but also his downfall, according to what we hear in the podcast.

Everything started to go wrong with Michel Brûlé for India Desjardins when she wanted to end her Aurélie Laflamme series after eight volumes, as she had planned, because it had been her artistic choice from the start.

“I have the impression that Michel took refusals badly. Basically, as long as you said yes, he could give you the moon. But when you said no, it’s like he doesn’t accept it. Consent is not just about sexual assault. Setting limits, giving consent, is in many areas. »

The author wanted to recover the rights of Aurélie Laflamme in arbitration. She received tons of insulting and threatening emails from Michel Brûlé, who was convinced that she was organizing a plot against him. “When I started fighting, he stopped paying me. Under contract, he’s the one with the paycheque. I had to dip into my RRSPs and it cost me a lot to get Aurélie back. I am proud to have fought, because this character is important to me, there are young people who still write to me every day. In arbitration, I didn’t get everything I wanted, but it allowed me to no longer have contact with him. Except that I was always afraid to meet him at book fairs or other events. I was really scared. I even told friends that, if something happened to me, I had to tell what was happening with Michel Brûlé…”

Regardless of the impact of this show, it has already transformed someone: India Desjardins. “I haven’t been the same person since. When I started it, I had fear, resentment, prejudice, and not just towards Michel, but towards the justice system. I had a misunderstanding of certain issues. This project allowed me to acquire knowledge and to have more rationality. To put words on things that I have experienced, it allowed me to understand them and to go through them too. Information and knowledge bring you weapons. That’s what I went looking for. »

Fall: Michel Brûléan India Desjardins podcast, online on OHdio on Tuesday, May 31.

The Urgency of Bill 35

India Desjardins wants her experience to serve something bigger than herself. Building on her notoriety and success, she wants to help other authors by supporting the adoption of Bill 35, which aims to modify the laws on the status of the artist so that writers have better working conditions, among other things. and better contracts with publishers, including a right to collective bargaining. While she is preparing a film for us for Christmas, India Desjardins does not understand why she has better conditions as a screenwriter than as an author. “For me, Bill 35 is an emergency,” she said. Authors are not protected if they experience a labor dispute. When it’s going well, there’s no problem, but when it’s going badly, it’s really bad. »

India Desjardins wishes to emphasize that there are above all good publishers, that there is no conspiracy or omerta, but believes that the status quo in relation to writers’ rights must end. “The book industry is based on someone’s product being paid for performance, whereas most people who are in this industry are paid for their work. »

She often hears that the publisher takes the financial risk and the author the creative risk. “It’s as if we were told that it is a privilege to publish, as if we expected writers to be in a state of recognition. But everyone in the channel is paid, except the authors, who are the basis of the whole channel. In fact, we can say that the authors are paid with 10% of the sales, but in a world where the sales of a bestseller are on average 2000 to 5000 copies, do the math. The death of François Blais made me think a lot about that. We’re talking about an author who was talented, who couldn’t live off his pen, who was a janitor at night. I find that thinking about this environment is important and urgent,” she says.

“I hope that law 35 will be adopted before the end of the parliamentary session on June 10, she continues, because otherwise it will be postponed again. This law will make it possible to bring things to 2022. I hope that my podcast show will show that we are in a situation of power imbalance and that when we experience a conflict, we are on our own. »