With his third try, File a complaint, author and director Léa Clermont-Dion claims to deliver her most intimate story to date. Through fragments of life and reflections on power, the 32-year-old woman believes she has regained her voice by recounting the legal process she went through to pursue her former boss, who attacked her when she was 17 years old.
“Initially, six years ago, I started a journal to release my negative emotions. As I wrote, I began to see a story being woven,” she explains, about the book which hits bookstores on Tuesday, published by the publishing house Le Cheval d’August .
Mme Clermont-Dion says she started blacking out pages when she filed a complaint in 2017 against ex-journalist Michel Venne, who was finally found guilty in 2021 of assault and sexual exploitation against her. On September 28, he asked the Quebec Court of Appeal to overturn the verdict against him. The three judges reserved the case.
“I ask the question again,” said M.me Clermont-Dion, taking up a question she asks at the end of her book: “When will this end?” » She specifies, however, that she does not want to discourage victims who wish to file a complaint.
For the postdoctoral researcher, writing about her experience of the legal process was therapeutic and liberating. “What I experienced at the courthouse was such a strange sensation and sometimes even a little violent. I felt like talking about it. Then, literature is the last den of total freedom. All the nuances I would have liked to do [durant le procès] and also bring my perspective on the situation, I do it in the book,” she explains, sitting on a sofa in the lobby of the Gault hotel, in Old Montreal.
What I experienced at the courthouse was such a strange feeling and sometimes even a little violent. I felt like talking about it.
“It was my trial,” continues the author. “A victim can never say “my trial”, it is rather that of the aggressor. I reclaim things,” she says. She also refrains from naming Michel Venne in the story, designating him as John Doe. “It’s not a book about him, it’s about what I experienced. »
With this essay, she says she was able to take a step back from her experience of the legal process. In the documentary series You just have to file a complaint, which she co-directed and which was released in 2021, she rather revealed her journey practically “live”. “I was neither in analysis nor in intimacy in You just have to file a complaint. I showed reality. »
The author of Revenge of the ugly and Superb estimate that File a complaint is his most assertive story to date. “I found my voice in writing, because it’s really the duality between thinking and feeling things. I really like this harmony,” she maintains.
Mme Clermont-Dion also draws a link between his essay File a complaint and his new documentary podcast Why so much hatred?. “The greatest hostility I have felt in life was in a courtroom. And hostility relates to negative emotions, and hatred is one of them in essence,” she explains.
Over the course of five episodes in which she interviews experts and guests, she seeks to understand where the hatred that we find particularly on the Web comes from. “The roots are essentially fear, accentuated by socio-affective factors of vulnerability, which are worse in times of crisis,” she maintains.
Power, everywhere
According to Léa Clermont-Dion, the breadcrumb trail of her book is power in all its forms. She also evokes the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault on this subject. “For him, power is everywhere. It is scattered, it is in all spheres of our lives. This is what I do in life: detect where this power is, when it arrives in our lives, whether it is in a courtroom or when you go to file a complaint and someone receives you. she said, in an animated tone.
She traces the genesis of the #MeToo movement to denounce sexual violence, while peppering her book with definitions of terms like “Rape culture” or “Predator”. The power of words comes up again and again in the essay, both those that hurt, but also those that emancipate.
At one point in the story, Mme Clermont-Dion clings to the words of French writer Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022. “She is one of the first to have told the lives of women with sobriety, but always with realism […] It’s as if she authorized the freedom of speech because she did it for so many years,” she notes, her eyes shining.
The thirty-year-old says she took pleasure in writing fragments of life by appealing to her senses, such as the episode where the flatulence of her infant Nina interrupted the conversation she was having with a lawyer and investigators in the offices of the Director of criminal and penal prosecutions.
During these years, her two children, now aged 3 and 4, made her safe by bringing her back to the essentials, she explains.
She also evokes with emotion the one who was her guide during this legal process, investigator Daniel Raymond, of the Quebec City Police Department. He died last July at the age of 49 from cancer. “I was extremely saddened by his passing. It was a bit of my pillar in there,” she says, misty-eyed.