Georges* still hasn't told his own child.
Posted at 5:00 am.
More than 60 years after he was repeatedly attacked by a member of the Brothers of Christian Education congregation, the 74-year-old feels unable to do so, he claims.
Anyone who has had a successful career in the provincial civil service has always been a “workaholic”. He wants to explain to her why he was never at home as a little boy.
“My child suffered so much from my absence,” he laments.
Work was his drug to freeze his suffering.
Pain from the sexual assaults he was subjected to between the ages of 12 and 14**.
It took everything he had to tell his own wife. In fact, his confidences came too late. The couple was in mediation regarding their separation after 30 years of living together.
And then, only then, did he explain to her why he ran away from home; Always “out there” for work.
Why was it so difficult for him to be touched? Let yourself be loved.
Why he woke up so often “panicked” in his sleep. All those years of living “like strangers, living in the same house, without touching each other, in separate rooms.” “She was legitimately disgusted with me and left me,” he said.
Georges doesn't blame him. If he were him, he would have done the same.
It was a painful secret that I had to keep all my life. I'm still shaking.
Georges, in a long interview with La Presse
Georges is one of the participants in the motion for authorization to bring a class action lawsuit against the Brothers of Christian Instruction (FIC); motion that returns to court this month.
The campaign is aimed at people and their heirs who were sexually abused by an employee, member or employee of this religious community between January 1, 1940 and the upcoming judgment in Quebec. The amount sought is $10 million in punitive damages.
Georges was granted anonymity in connection with the campaign. The media therefore cannot mention him by name.
The FIC denies the request for approval of the class action lawsuit. Contacted by La Presse, Me Luc Lachance from the firm representing the municipality – LDB Lawyers – told us via email that it “follows a policy of not commenting on current legal cases”.
A job offer as a decoy
Georges comes from a family where people become lawyers from father to son; a family in which we are politically active. But when it came time to go to law school, he says he was too emotionally screwed up. He “failed” his registration like a failed act.
If he is testifying today, it will be to encourage other victims of the aggressor brothers and priests to come forward.
At the age of 12, Georges was orphaned by his father, who had died two years earlier after a long illness. His very religious mother took care of the large family alone.
Brother Samuel-Marie – real name Alcide Tessier – had offered him a paid job in a small printing shop in the FIC community in his region.
This job offer is not a detail for a teenager who then lives in a family that has fallen into precarious circumstances due to the illness and death of the patriarch. Brother Samuel-Marie, who died in 2004, was a teacher and provincial treasurer of the community.
Georges claims that the attacks took place in the print shop. During school they would have performed every weekend, i.e. on the days he was working. In the summer, “almost every day, sometimes twice a day.”
At the time of the attacks, the teenager did not tell anyone about it. “It’s not something we brag or talk about,” he said.
Then, at 14, he discovered that he wasn't his brother's only “great love.” The latter provided “medical care,” which is what he would have told little Georges and other little boys.
I had just realized that I had been betrayed, that I had been deceived, that it was all a lie, only to finally realize that I had been abused and raped.
George
At that time, Georges developed a “terrible rage,” even though he felt “so stupid.” He becomes a shadow of himself. “I had doubts about my intellectual and emotional abilities, extreme humiliation, I was dirty, a person who no longer had a place in society,” he says. It closed me off from life, from love and deprived me of a normal life. »
Marked for life
Georges will spend the rest of his life “punishing himself.” First at the seminar, by multiplying the difficult tasks that no one wanted to do, like waxing all the floors. He slept little or not at all. Then during his higher education, where he studied during the day and also campaigned in a political party while working a night job.
He can't sleep anyway. “At night I was choking, having panic attacks and waking up suddenly so I couldn't sleep. I avoided going to bed,” he says. He develops all sorts of illnesses (asthma, headaches) that he cannot cure.
Georges will pursue his entire career to the fullest, even if it ends up costing him his family.
It wasn't until he retired a few years ago that he started to really take care of himself: long meditations, gardening and long walks.
Every day I try to get rid of this anger.
George
Georges learned in the media a little less than two years ago of the existence of the class action lawsuit led by the law firm Arsenault Dufresne Wee Avocats. He signed, driven by a deep desire “that these people who are said to be religious, excellent educators and of great integrity, would recognize, in one way or another, that there was something unhealthy in their Christian teaching… and with that “would start to change their behavior.”
So far, 63 people have registered as victims in this class action lawsuit.
Questions concern Georges – and will always haunt him: “What would my life have been like without this painful experience that I have never forgotten?” Without punishment or anger, without this ostracized mark on my forehead, without this secret that I could not reveal to anyone , without that cursed smell of semen that I hated so much my whole life and that I constantly smelled on myself, without that cursed stain What overwhelmed me? »
*His name is fictitious; his story is not.
**The allegations have not yet been proven in court, so we use the conditional.