Indigenous women who claimed to have suffered numerous abuses from Sûreté du Québec patrol officers in Val-d’Or were entirely credible, a Radio-Canada journalist testified at the $3 million lawsuit filed by the police against the state company.
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“They didn’t all say the same thing, we see that it wasn’t always easy for them to speak… It wasn’t said in a belligerent tone. From a journalistic point of view, I consider them [comme] credible,” affirmed Josée Dupuis, this Friday, at the Montreal courthouse, without however mentioning other more in-depth verifications apart from certain corroborations.
On her second day on the witness stand, the now-retired journalist defended her report entitled Abuse of the SQ: women break the silence, which was broadcast in 2015 on the show Investigation.
Indigenous women from Val-d’Or, in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, claimed to have been victims of physical and sexual violence by police officers. This led to the creation of the Viens commission on relations between Aboriginal people and public services, but without criminal charges due to lack of evidence leading to a conviction.
Shock wave
Except that the report also caused a commotion among the Val-d’Or police officers, who completely deny the allegations. Accusing Radio-Canada and the journalist of having defamed them, they are demanding nearly $3 million in compensation.
“My perception is that I was seen as a sexual abuser and not as a police officer. How many times I was told that I was a rapist… We were afraid for our safety, it made it dangerous to work in Val-d’Or”, for example, testified the police officer Maxim Baril, during the civil trial which began last month.
The journalist, for her part, defended her work, particularly in connection with an extract from the report where indigenous women make several allegations of violent or sexual crimes on the part of police officers.
“They were people who spoke for themselves, they were free to speak,” said the journalist, affirming that there was no indication that the women had agreed among themselves to deliver their versions. “We had examples that satisfied us.”
She recognizes a mistake
The journalist convinced them to speak openly by explaining to them that they “were not alone, there was strength in numbers” to support their remarks. Other women had corroborated some of the claims, Ms added.me Dupuis.
The latter, however, recognized an error, regarding a woman who said she had been raped by a police officer 20 years earlier. The journalist believed that it was a provincial police patrolman, except that the alleged event rather concerned the municipal police which had since disappeared.
As for an alleged victim who had given different versions to an investigator, Mme Dupuis recalled that journalists did not have access to police data and that despite disparities on details, for her it remained a case of an indigenous woman “brutalized and taken against her will” to a remote location by a police officer.
Another woman was believed, among other things because she had been “honest about what had not happened” and because the journalist did not feel a desire for revenge during the interview.
Mme Dupuis, however, assured that he had not disseminated certain information, giving as an example allegations from two indigenous women that investigators and double agents had also attacked them.
“It’s not that we didn’t believe them, but we were less sure,” she said.
His testimony, before Judge Babak Barin of the Superior Court of Quebec, continues next week.