The lawyer for the teacher filmed hitting a 3-year-old girl spoke in the columns of Le Figaro to “reestablish the truth” about the facts. For him, this gesture was not that of an unbalanced person, but of a teacher who cracked “under the pressure”.
The images of a teacher hitting a 3-year-old girl in a classroom the day after the start of the school year shocked public opinion at the beginning of the week. In the columns of Figarothe teacher’s lawyer is defending this Friday, September 13, a mother and teacher who has had an “impeccable” career in national education. “She is in shock, obviously,” confides Me Laurent Hazan, adding that his “client felt abandoned from the beginning of this case” both by her hierarchy and by the Minister of National Education. If his client’s action is reprehensible, Me Laurent Hazan regrets that Nicole Belloubet’s reaction has “hidden the malaise of National Education.”
“This is not to minimize or excuse them, but this type of thing happens every day,” he says, preferring to see his client not as a “black sheep, degenerate,” but rather as “an experienced, respected civil servant who had an impeccable career and who unfortunately cracked under the pressure.”
For him, the real problem would be the teacher’s “unbearable working conditions”. He denounces in no particular order “a fairly large number of students”, a “not well prepared” start to the school year, “new students sent by the town hall” or even “a somewhat complicated environment”. That day, he reports, the little girl had just “thrown a chair”. The “straw that broke the camel’s back” for his client who allegedly “immediately apologized” after her gesture.
What about the previous report made in 2012?
“In this case that dates back to 2012, nothing happened,” dismisses Me Laurent Hazan, who even speaks of “a slanderous denunciation”. “There was no follow-up, no complaint, no judicial inquiry or even an internal inquiry. We are trying to make a precedent out of it, but that is not the case”, insists the man who regrets that “parents, today, and for a very long time, no longer hesitate to oppose teachers when their child has gotten a bad grade, when they want to avoid a subject being addressed in a program, etc.”
For Me Laurent Hazan, his client certainly did not deserve “such media lynching”. Deploring a “sadly banal case”, he invites us to take a step back to understand the situation rather than “tarnishing the good image of our teachers”. As for his client, he assures her: “She will not shirk justice.”