In the pretty room of the Mandarin Oriental, a luxurious hotel on rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, this February 20 at 10 a.m., a discreet bouquet of pink flowers sits on the small glass coffee table. Maureen Kearney, 67, arrived the day before from Bressuire, in Deux-Sèvres, where she lives with her husband. Its calm contrasts with the bustle that runs through the corridors of the second floor.
This former CFDT delegate from Areva, a French nuclear multinational, has set up her quarters there during the promotion of the film. The Syndicalist, by Jean-Paul Salomé, in theaters on 1er March, inspired by its own history. “Today I’m fine. I’ve found my power [“j’ai retrouvé mon pouvoir”] », immediately announces this Irish woman, blond hair gathered in an impeccable bun. If the broad smile from which she does not depart suggests a certain appeasement, the road to reconstruction has been long and tortuous.
On December 17, 2012, Maureen Kearney was found by her cleaning lady, in her house in the Paris suburbs, tied to a chair, the letter A scarified on her stomach, the handle of a knife stuck in her vagina. At that time, she tried to warn even in the highest spheres of the State against the risks of transfer of nuclear technology from Areva to China.
Then follows a terrible judicial spiral, as unexpected as it is destructive: from the status of victim, she passes to that of suspect, accused of having staged an imaginary crime. For fear of the judicial and industrial steamroller that is set in motion, and in order to protect her family, she ends up making a false confession: “I was ready to say that I was Jack the Ripper”, she says today. She was cleared in 2018, after the appeal trial.
“It’s very different to experience something terrible and see it. I also took the measure of what my loved ones have experienced. Maureen Kearney
Of these years of ordeal, the journalist of The Obs Caroline Michel-Aguirre draws an investigation, The Syndicalist (Stock, 2019), basis of the film by Jean-Paul Salomé. The feature film team submits a script to him, where we find all the actors in this state scandal, from the bosses of EDF and Areva to Arnaud Montebourg, Minister of the Economy of the era. After careful proofreading, Maureen Kearney gives her approval. She discovers her story projected on the big screen for the first time in September 2022, in the Parisian premises of the producer, Bertrand Faivre.
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