On October 2, 2021, a demonstration in front of the Tenon hospital, in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, brought together dozens of people. They were gathered to demand the resignation of a great professor of the establishment, the gynecologist and obstetrician Emile Daraï. This surgeon is a specialist in endometriosis, a gynecological disease that affects one in ten women in France.
In recent weeks, three patients, including a minor, have filed a complaint against him for rape, and the Paris prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation. He is accused of gynecological procedures that he would have performed without the consent of the patients. Several medical interns, who accompanied the professor during the exams, said they were shocked by his practices.
“We’ve known it for a long time, we can’t do anything”
“If we look at the definition of the word rape, I witnessed a rape“, testifies an intern in this extract of” Special Envoy “. She assures to have then spoken to her superiors, who would have reacted by”total silence“, and having referred it to her faculty, where she would have heard the answer:”We have known it for a long time, there is nothing we can do. ”
For several years, the hospital had received letters from patients complaining about Professor Daraï’s practices. The director general of the Assistance publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP) Martin Hirsch acknowledged this in an email sent to his teams on October 8, 2021: he reports “seven complaints received over the past seven years “.
The journalists of “Special Envoy” collected the testimony of the first patient to have raised the alarm. After an operation, she came to consult Professor Daraï in 2014. She denounces the brutality of an intimate examination, carried out, according to her, without his consent, “a gesture that is not a normal medical gesture“, corn “barbarous, savage brutality“.
Contacted via his lawyer, Emile Daraï refused the interview requests of “Special Envoy”. The AP-HP opened an internal investigation on September 20. The doctor, who claims his innocence, was dismissed from his post as head of department. At the end of October, he was still consulting at Tenon hospital …
Extract from “Sexual assault on prescription”, a report to see in “Special Envoy” on November 4, 2021.
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