The Val-d’Or police officers claim to have experienced very difficult times, both in their personal and professional lives, after the broadcast of the report.Investigation on police abuse against indigenous women in 2015.
Insulted from all sides, forced to defend themselves from acts that they say they never even heard of, they say they have experienced a lot of anger, incomprehension and anxiety, to the point of having lost the pride in doing their profession in this context.
“It changed my life,” police officer Maxim Baril said Wednesday morning before Superior Court Judge Babak Barin. The 34-year-old man was the very first witness to be heard in the case of the Val-d’Or SQ police officers against Radio-Canada, which opened Monday at the Montreal courthouse. In total, around forty police officers are suing the public broadcaster and journalist Josée Dupuis for defamation.
Police officer Maxim Baril claims to have felt “a lot of emotions” while listening to the report, the evening it was broadcast, in October 2015, mainly “anger” and “incomprehension”. Although no police officers were personally named in the report, he says it gave the impression that all Val-d’Or police officers were abusers. And in a small town of 30,000 inhabitants where “everyone knows each other”, he says he felt targeted.
“For me, it was nonsense,” he told Judge Barin. We were talking about my work and we came to say that it was common practice for us, the police officers in Val-d’Or, to have blowjobs performed in the woods by indigenous women, that we mistreated them, that we “bottled” in their heads. You don’t know me, but my colleagues would tell you that I have good ethics and I think I am a good person. I saw that and I couldn’t believe that people were saying that about me. »
“Never, never, never”
Police officer Maxim Baril considers it “inconceivable” that such abuses could have been committed by his colleagues and completely rejects the accusations made by the indigenous women of Val-d’or reported in the report. ” One says [dans le reportage] that it’s common, but I’ve never, ever, ever heard a police officer allude to fellatio or a police officer who would have taken someone into the woods, I’ve never heard that, I’ve never seen that of my career. »
The police officer says he slept poorly that night, worried about the repercussions the report would have on him, his life, his career. He was worried about the insults he read against the Val-d’Or police officers on social networks and said he was afraid that his vehicle would be vandalized or that someone would attack him. “Anger turned into worry, I wondered what our lives were going to be like from that moment on. »
In the following days, he took sick leave and isolated himself for fear of judgment from others, because everyone in town, he said, was all he talked about. Back at work, interventions had become more difficult because the environment had become “super hostile”. He was called a “sexual abuser” and a “rapist”.
All this affected his self-esteem, he said. “I had the impression that other people’s views were different following the report, because I was no longer seen as a police officer who was doing a good job, but as a sexual abuser. »
No smoke without fire?
Two other police officers came to testify to the same effect on Wednesday. They too said they were “stunned” and “angry” when they heard the abuse reported in the report, which they consider to be “lies”.
They speak of a “bomb” that was thrown into the population, who judged them very harshly. “I was stressed, devastated,” said police officer Benoît Fortier by videoconference. We went from the Val-d’Or police to the Val-d’Or abusers. »
Like him, police officer Guillaume Morin claims to have found it difficult to “give repeated explanations” to those close to him to explain that not only was he not targeted by these allegations, but that what had been reported in the report “n ‘wasn’t true’.
“One thing we often heard is that there is no smoke without fire,” said the police officer, who also testified by videoconference. I always told them that there is no police officer I work with who works the way it is alleged in the report. And if that’s the case, he would have been denounced. There is no police officer who will condone someone assaulting and raping women. »
The three officers spoke of the shame they had to overcome to continue their work. “I was ashamed to wear the uniform,” summarized Guillaume Morin. Before that, when I told people I was a police officer, I was always proud to say that I was a police officer. Now, following the report, I no longer even wanted to say that I was a police officer in Val-d’Or. I was ashamed to say that I was a police officer in Val-d’Or because it was ingrained that the Val-d’Or police officer is an abuser of women and that he rapes indigenous women. »
The trial will take place until May 10 at the Montreal courthouse.