Writer and committed citizen, the author has taught literature at college, is president of the governing board of an elementary school and member of the editorial board of Quebec letters. She co-directed and co-wrote the collective essay Shock treatments and tarts. Critical assessment of the management of COVID-19 in Quebec (All in all).
Men, keep raping us. You have lives, careers. You are someone, rape is not going to prevent you from flourishing. You have great things to accomplish, you must travel on business, earn your bread to match your salary as a man, your status as an engineer.
And if you have to do it, for the context, drink (as we know, drunkenness explains many behaviors, except when you are a woman who is the victim of an assault; we then forget the details that will allow our testimony to be fully believable). Do it fast, minimize the number of fingers (one is good; two is better, but more is maybe too much), choose a sleeping friend, photograph her nine times.
Be white, rich, exercise a noble or liberal profession, be a star or, better still, a promising athlete. Undertake a certificate in law.
Put all the chances on your side to conclude a successful sexual assault. Unpunished. And pray to find a judge who will be your ersatz, who can project himself into your life: what would become of his if privileges were taken away from him? Stop traveling? Facing the consequences of his actions? To see his life crumble for two fingers and a few photos, for an attack “which took place after all quickly”? He may have so much empathy for you, his fellow man, that he will respond to your guilty plea with a conditional discharge.
(Oh, I was going to forget: you have already assaulted in the past? Confess it: this testifies to your transparency and your good faith, not to your dangerousness for the women you will meet, after your meeting as a consultant in Lyon or in Djibouti. What? You’ve never traveled for work before?)
That’s all he says, the judgment rendered by Matthieu Poliquin against Simon Houle. Explicitly or implicitly. And that’s why people react so much.
The Marc Bissonnette affair
This judgment fell while I was listening to the most recent season of the excellent podcast My version of the facts. Isabelle Richer returns this time to the case of Marc Bissonnette, a plastic surgeon declared not guilty of a sexual assault committed on an anesthetized patient in 1995, despite two direct eyewitnesses, the testimonies of paramedics and the semen taken upon waking of the victim the next morning at the hospital.
The strategy of the defense, during the trial, consisted in painting a glowing portrait of the important surgeon… and in discrediting the victim. Bissonnette’s medical colleagues came to describe him as a helping, humane man, a leader in his field, a person whom society could not do without. On the other side, the defense lawyer cooked for days the eyewitnesses and the victim, simple employee of a bank, asking them to describe with precision the configuration of the operating room, the color of the clothes from the doctor, questioning whether what they thought was a penis was actually a spot or a shadow…
The judge almost congratulated the surgeon for not having “succumbed” sooner in front of this beautiful woman whom he had been treating for years. In the end, he discredited the victim, because she said that the sexual relationship she had had with her lover a few days before the attack had been protected, while he claimed not to have worn a condom. Bissonnette lied throughout his trial by outright denying the assault. Throughout the podcast, Isabelle Richer points out that such remarks and such judgment would no longer be possible after #MeToo. This explains why our arms fell away, almost thirty years later, when we discovered the judgment against another “respectable man”.
The hope of the appeal of the DPCP
Tempers calmed down when the DPCP announced that it would appeal… then they heated up again when the Quebec Association of Defense Lawyers (AQAAD) sided with Judge Poliquin. In particular, no doubt, because it is not the “spirit of revenge” that animates the indignant population. It is the spirit of justice.
What is certain is that it is important to quickly rebuild trust with the courts specializing in sexual violence. Victims again feel betrayed by the system. The Poliquin judgment, which cites the Rozon case several times, is also a slap in the face of the Courageuses. It highlights (once again, once too often) a stark reality: almost impossible to be a perfect victim, but possible to be an almost perfect aggressor – and this one deserves a second chance.
The parallels between the Bissonnette and Houle cases go beyond the legal framework: faced with the impunity of the justice system, the surgeon was struck off the Order of the College of Physicians for five years. Simon Houle’s employer fired him. Like what the two men were not as essential to society as what the two magistrates were good enough to (make) believe… Despite his fine words, the Dr Bissonnette assaulted two other patients when he returned to service. He will eventually be expelled for life.
The similarities could have ended there, too early to know if Simon Houle was going to reoffend. But I was going to put the end to this text when the news came out: it would now be done. Engineer’s ring on his finger, he would have grabbed the buttocks of a woman in an all-inclusive, in Cayo Coco. He has traveled so far, hasn’t he, that he would have told him “it’s not me, it’s my hands”, we read in the Radio-Canada report! Although the statements of the latter have not yet passed the test of the courts, the question remains: was the risk misjudged – and the accused, misjudged? If nothing else, the Simon Houle case demonstrates that it is time that men’s careers did not weigh more heavily in the balance than women’s traumas. Besides (since some tend to forget), they too have lives — and careers.