It is the fifth day of a trial that questions, shakes, and revolts. On this afternoon of September 6, Bruno Daunizeau, expert psychologist and psychoanalyst, steps forward before the criminal court of Vaucluse, in Avignon. His role: to determine the traumatic impact of Gisèle Pélicot, when she learned that her husband was drugging her so that men would rape her, for ten years. In the dock, Bruno Daunizeau lists “the difficulties falling asleep”, “the anxiety attacks”, “the hypersensitivity to noise” and “the suicidal thoughts”, which now punctuate the victim’s daily life.
But another passage from his presentation is intriguing: on December 21, 2020, during his meeting with Gisèle Pélicot to carry out his assessment, the psychologist said he had carried out the blank page test, intended to measure her degree of “influenceability”. “I asked her to sign this blank document, which she did”, a sign of “a willingness to follow instructions without questioning, out of respect or trust”, explains the expert, contacted by L’Express. According to him, 98% of people find themselves in this configuration during this test, the 2% who refuse showing conversely “a greater reluctance to act”, which can indicate “an independence of mind, a more marked mistrust, or a desire to control the situation”, he continues.
Problem: this test, which comes from “his long clinical experience” – a way of saying that it is an invention – has no scientific basis, and recalls other vague theories, often used in trials by experts of a psychoanalytic orientation. “As soon as a psychological assessment tool does not meet the psychometric criteria established for several decades by research, it cannot be considered valid”, criticizes Mickaël Morlet Rivelli, psychologist and legal expert at the Reims Court of Appeal. For this professional, the 98% rate of positive responses, mentioned by Bruno Daunizeau, simply means that “this exercise is not sufficiently discriminating to allow any interpretation”. “Many reasons can explain why an individual applies a given instruction, particularly in the context of a legal expertise”, he recalls.
Maëlle knows something about it. On August 2, 2018, the young woman, then aged 22, was also examined by Bruno Daunizeau, as part of a case of rape and domestic violence committed by her former partner. For nearly two hours, the expert asked her questions about her childhood and her sexuality. At the end of the interview, the latter handed her a blank sheet of paper and asked her, again, to sign it. “Since we had a long discussion and he was a professional, I didn’t really ask myself any questions, thinking that he was perhaps going to analyze my handwriting,” she remembers.
In the report of the expert appraisal, Maëlle then learns that she “seems to be someone who is particularly impressionable and susceptible to influence”… Questioned by L’Express on the reliability of his test, Bruno Daunizeau specifies: “This approach is used as a complement to other clinical and psychological observations, and not as a stand-alone or decisive test. I do not rely solely on this gesture to assess a person’s credibility, but I use it in combination with other indicators of suggestibility and influenceability, in particular behavioral observation and verbal discourse.”
A practice based on intuition
In his expert reports, Bruno Daunizeau indicates that he is interested in “micro-expressions and other involuntary bodily signals”, “valuable indicators”, according to him, to “understand the emotional state of a person at a given moment”. At the Mazan rape trial, the presiding judge questioned him on the possibility of assessing Gisèle Pélicot’s sincerity, to which the expert responded that signs, such as “eyes that are constantly moving” or “sweaty hands”, testified to her “a fairly low insincerity factor”.
In the event that Bruno Daunizeau could not shake a person’s hand to check its wetness, the psychologist has come up with another test, which “consists of placing the hand on a sheet of paper and observing whether it adheres to it,” he explains. But for Frédéric Tomas, a doctor in psychology, lecturer at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and specialist in lying, “micro-expressions, if they exist at all, have no direct relationship with the emotions expressed or with deception.”
Sweaty hands, for example, can be explained by “nervousness as well as extreme pathological sweating (hyperhidrosis) or contextual sweating (humid and hot environment)”, he notes, “all reasons why a sheet of paper would supposedly stick to a person’s palm”. “The speech of this expert psychologist demonstrates, once again, the gap that remains between ‘French-style’ clinical practice, mainly supported by intuition or experience, and a practice based on evidence from scientific research”, supports Mickaël Morlet Rivelli, who has been defending for several years a methodological control of legal experts, as in the United States.
Because Bruno Daunizeau is not the only one to mobilize concepts devoid of scientific basis. Dominique Pélicot, the main accused, was assessed by the psychiatrist Paul Bensussan, known for defending for years the controversial concept of “parental alienation syndrome”. This theory was not mobilized in this case specifically, but it designates the influence that a parent would exert on his child so that he denigrates the other parent, sometimes to the point of unjustly accusing him of physical abuse or sexual violence.
However, this concept does not appear in any classification of mental disorders, and the WHO, like the French Ministry of Justice, have rejected its use “due to lack of sufficient scientific evidence”, considering that it aimed “to discredit the child’s words or attitude”. Several expert reports carried out by Bensussan nevertheless refer to it, to the point that four child protection associations contacted the National Council of the Order of Physicians in April 2022. Although the institution considered that “the ethical breaches were not proven”, the complaint was nevertheless transferred to the disciplinary chamber, and is still under investigation. “We would like Dr Bensussan not to be renewed on the list of experts, until there is a real investigation”, maintains Pascal Cussigh, president of the CDP-Enfance association. Contacted by L’Express, Paul Bensussan said he “reserves his responses to the ordinal jurisdiction”. By email, his lawyer specifies that “parental alienation, although its detractors deny its existence and the concept is controversial in psychiatry, unfortunately constitutes a reality experienced and suffered by many parents (…) in the context of conflictual family separations”. And to conclude that Paul Bensussan “reserves the right to sue the complaining associations for slanderous denunciation”.
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