A woman accused of being a “cult sexual predator” was held in jail until she declared herself a “victim” of the “guru” and became an anti-cult speaker.
by Massimo Introvigne
Sometimes articles that are meant to expose the evil of “cults” inadvertently have the opposite effect. On June 26, an extraordinary interview was published by the French daily “Ouest France.” It was about an old affair, which led to the “female guru” (in France, the originally honorific word “guru” is always used in a derogatory sense) of what was called “the Parc d’accueil cult” in Lisieux being sentenced to five years in prison in 2013.
As in many other cases, the “guru”, Françoise Dercle, was first denounced by a private anti-cult organization. The group was raided on June 27, 2007. The strategy used was to place all the members, who were considered “victims” of the “guru”, in police custody (garde à vue), as will happen in 2023 in the MISA case. A police officer explained that this was recommended by anti-cult psychiatrists. Following their advice, they “put all the followers in custody. It is a method that may seem surprising, but it is well thought out: ‘We absolutely had to make the group explode, make sure that the followers could not communicate with each other.’ Shocked and angry, they were nevertheless a little clearer on the second day in police custody.”
In the end, only two women remained in custody: Françoise Dercle and one who goes by the pseudonym “Coralie” in the “Ouest France” interview. Here the story gets even more interesting. The group is accused of sexual abuse, including of minors. “Coralie” herself is “accused of rape” and is told that she “will receive a sentence of 15 to 20 years in prison.” She is not allowed to see her children while she is in prison.
During her six months in prison, again under the supervision of anti-cult psychiatrists, “Coralie” is transformed by prosecutors from “cult sexual predator” to “victim.” As “Ouest France” reports, “during her six months in prison, she became aware of the extent of her subjugation. ‘The pain of not seeing my children opened a breach that allowed me to go deep inside myself. Prison was a remedy.’” In other words, she was taught to reconstruct her experience as one of “brainwashing.” If she committed crimes, it was because she was being “brainwashed” by the “guru,” so she was not responsible.
She had to prove that her “conversion,” or perhaps “de-conversion,” was genuine and became a lecturer in the anti-cult circuit. In effect, she was effectively blackmailed and put in a position where she had to choose between two public identities. Either she could continue to claim that she was not a “victim,” in which case she was threatened with a prison sentence of “fifteen to twenty years” (note that Dercle himself only got five), or she could “confess” that she was a “victim,” in which case she would be released from prison, declared not responsible for any crime she may have committed, and asked to participate in the propaganda effort against “cults.”
It is clear that if members of the Lisieux movement were guilty of sexual abuse, they would have been rightly prosecuted and convicted, although in France there is always the impression that “cult members” accused of “brainwashing” have more trouble than others getting a fair trial. More interesting than the case itself is the story of “Coralie,” a textbook example of how “victims” are manufactured by a system of prosecutors, anti-cult movements, anti-cult psychiatrists, and the media. “Coralie” may never have committed a crime, but her case shows that even criminals can escape punishment if they reinvent themselves as “cult victims” and “anti-cult teachers.”
