Barely 24 hours after the broadcast of the documentary Witness CFwhich traces the experience of the Mayor of Longueuil, Catherine Fournier, through her sexual assault complaint process, here we are with an aftertaste of the 1950s.
On her Instagram account on Thursday, she relayed comments made about her assault, on the air, on the radio, by people paid to say such nonsense. “Catherine Fournier shouldn’t have been in her attacker’s bed”, “if she had been at my house, I would have tried myself too”, “what was she thinking” – her fault, basically. As if the #MeToo movement had never been there.
Ironically, no doubt, it is curious how this case follows the trajectory of the #MeToo movement in Quebec. Harold LeBel assaulted Catherine Fournier in October 2017, even as the whole world was swept by waves of testimonies of sexual assaults. The former MP filed a complaint in the summer of 2020, when Quebec was shaken by another wave of testimonies, and Harold LeBel was sentenced at the end of 2022, a few months after the establishment of specialized courts for sexual and domestic violence (in many ways the “jewel” of the reforms undertaken in Quebec in the wake of #MeToo).
Like what judicialization, reforms, exchanges of good practices do not always give the exact measure of the progress made…
In Witness CF, which was made on the sly on the sidelines of the trial, Catherine Fournier goes through moments of complete vulnerability. She describes the day of Harold LeBel’s arrest, in which a (blatant) lack of media precaution led to the disclosure of his identity despite a publication ban, as the “worst day of his life”.
She recounts the painful conversations with her loved ones induced by this flight. She redid the difficult story of her assault in front of the camera. She cashes in seeing her attacker plead not guilty. We see the waiting, the patience, the abnegation, the many times when it was necessary to repeat the violence, to replay the humiliation. For the rest, he had to be silent, turn his tongue 100 times, then wait, again, until the verdict and even beyond.
This film exercises a form of justice through narration. Catherine Fournier says it bluntly: I wanted to regain control of my story. The judicial process — and this is the documentary’s most striking demonstration — does not conjure up everything. There was something else to say, something that a “successful” trial does not fix.
One element among others: when Catherine Fournier evokes these days with bitterness the indifference of her parliamentary colleagues in the face of the accusations brought against Harold LeBel. Had it not been for her presence in the National Assembly, she explains, her attacker would have continued to sit without anyone raising the flag. Dismissal from the PQ caucus for form, then a watchword: let justice take its course.
The reasoning here is brutally transparent: since formal justice has been delegated the task of examining the allegations, there was nothing more to be said. No duty of solidarity, no issue to debate. Above all, we should not hinder the work of justice with a capital J.
In the hands of the justice system, the facts cease to belong to their context, to the soil that produces them. Judicial seizure exonerates the community. It even prohibits any reaction that is not ordered by legal norms. We can’t talk about it anymore, we can’t decide anymore. This is exactly what happened in the case of Catherine Fournier. To illustrate that criminalization of sexual assault has the effect of depoliticizing these issues, one could hardly imagine a better example.
If Catherine Fournier can talk about her experience today, openly deplore the lack of deference from the media and the indifference of her colleagues, it is because she accepted, first of all, to comply with the demands of the complaint formal. She was copy : she remained discreet, she confided in the police and not on social networks, she never demanded solidarity, she did not politicize her condition before a court pronounced the guilt of her attacker.
It’s remarkable, but you have to see the attraction exercised here by a certain performance of feminine respectability. This is tricky, because while the stereotypes of the “perfect victim” of sexual assault have been (somewhat) dispelled, they have in many ways been replaced by the figure of the “perfect complainant”.
We insist on the fact that we must facilitate the complaint process for victims—that’s the catchphrase. But we forget that since #MeToo, the indomitable word, which names violence in broad daylight without encumbering itself with mediation by law, is much more tightly restrained. Risks of lawsuits, retaliation, taunts: The backlash of the #MeToo movement is strong, organized, backed by power, money and the binding force of law, and society has completely gone with the flow.
We often say that we must “continue to free speech”, but we do not seem to understand that speech has never been so monitored, supervised, and its respectability, scrutinized with a magnifying glass. Measuring the gains made by the #MeToo movement in the light of criminal convictions is a tricky game for survivors.
We will say it for form: revolutions rarely begin by entering a police station.