Gérard Miller is famous, Gérard Miller is on TV, Gérard Miller teaches at university, Gérard Miller likes hypnosis. Taken separately, none of these findings attract attention. In the book that the journalist Chloé Vienne devotes to the psychoanalyst, Serial Miller (Stock), everything fits together and makes sense. The academic approaches very young students on the faculty benches, he invites them to his television show, We tried everything, where he also spots prey in the public, then he invites them to his Parisian mansion, with an almost always identical operating mode: visit to the large residence, suggestion of hypnosis or massage in the “Japanese room”, touching on a petrified young girl. Several victims also describe rape. Some of the memory loss, “blackouts”. Faced with the psychologist’s networks and the insidious chain of events, none of them even think of filing a complaint. However, dozens of similar testimonies have multiplied since the magazine’s first revelations She, last January.
Pending the results of the investigation, it must be remembered that Gérard Miller remains presumed innocent. He denied any coercion in the sexual relations he had. In her investigation, less biographical than focused on the methods of a predator, Chloé Vienne shows how he was able to prosper for so many years. Her television colleagues could clearly see the cohorts of young women parading behind the scenes – Isabelle Mergault let out a contemptuous “encore” in front of a student, the technicians nicknamed him “how old are you”, “what class are you in” -, but the absence of any reprehensible act before their eyes, the absolute urbanity of the psychoanalyst prevented them from imagining possible attacks.
Faced with “doubt”, as the journalist writes, everyone looks away. Very few of Gérard Miller’s friends agreed to testify on their behalf. At the School of the Freudian Cause, the Lacanian association of which he is a figure, also total silence, as L’Express noted last August. What remains are the stories of the victims, reproduced in the first person. Their repetition reinforces the impression of a mechanical modus operandi, like a mechanical gesture on a factory production line. Several of these women confide that they have had many after-effects in their private lives. Excerpts. Etienne Girard
Two “markets”
In fact, his two hunting grounds, or “markets,” were connected. He moved from one of his reserves of young girls to another, he took those from Paris VIII, his students, to shows at the Moulin‐Rouge, he transposed them from a classroom to the backstage of a TV show. . As if he had made the frame disappear, as if he was preparing for confusion. His story further proves that several prey at the same time do not scare him, on the contrary. We begin to collect stories in which they go to his house in pairs. […]. In fact, he mixed them all and he mixed everything, the teacher, the columnist, the shrink, the hypnotist, the ages, the times. […]
Forcing through non-forcing
In his house, I have the impression that there are two kinds of rooms. The bright ones, where the professional, controlled, rational part occurs, where he behaves normally, where the meetings take place, like the office-study where Charlotte notices a large quantity of books that say he is cultured as well as a couch in “red, purple or purple” velvet and imposing, old and rustic furniture, rooms which, on the first floor, overlook the street, the large and well-equipped kitchen. And the dark rooms, which are transgressive rooms, such as that of the home cinema in the basement, made to be turned off, with red armchairs and a sofa, or the Japanese room, zen, with subdued lighting, with the kimono hanging on the wall, incense and massage oils. […]
This is where Armelle finds herself trapped, in this lair to which she was lured. He put her at ease, he enchanted her during the interview by showing himself charming, intelligent, he exposed her doubly, by extracting confidences from her and forcing her to undress thanks to all his authority as a healer and to put on a kimono, a highly charged garment, a cliché of Japanese eroticism. […]
What follows, this is one of the characteristics of aggression, takes place in the same color, the same tone, the same civility, the same non‐violence. Armelle insists on this way of bringing him to the worst without any violence: “He is a bit in the position of the doctor who asks his patient to do something. He does not force me. There has never been any violence physical, violence in the sense of beating or threat or aggressiveness”; “There was no physical violence. He didn’t throw me on a bed, that’s for sure. But he forced me through all the manipulation, by making me reveal my life , to ask me to be confident, to relax It is through his aura that he will have constrained me somewhere by taking advantage of his notoriety and his knowledge as a psychoanalyst. Armelle describes it well in these passages, the Gérard Miller style is the violence of non‐violence, forcing through non‐forcing, hypnosis without hypnosis. Its strategy would strictly follow a principle of non‐aggression. Snow Sinno evokes in sad tiger (P·O·L, 2023) the “mixture of perplexity and unease” that she feels “in the face of the extreme violence without violence that is abuse”.
In Gérard Miller, no signifier of violence, apart from red, an omnipresent color, no noise of rape, of aggressive virility. Rather gentleness, interest, care. The aggression, moreover, often begins with manipulation, a sort of therapeutic massage, a pretext for undressing and then a pretext for placing one’s hands and sliding them towards increasingly intimate places. This confusion between “giving a massage” and “taking a body” that he has created, like the illusionist, disorients his prey who are overwhelmed by a flood of questions. “What is really happening?”, they ask themselves while their body, perhaps also overcome by a paradoxical thought, can no longer move. […]
“But you don’t see Gérard Miller anymore?”
Charlotte admitted to me, speaking of Gérard Miller: “He ruined my life for a while. Because romantic relationships afterwards are catastrophic.” Suddenly, I wanted to know where her parents were in the story – after all she was only 15 years old. And the uncle who had known Miller when he was young? What did they say the night she went to the theater with him? What happened afterwards when they found out? They didn’t know immediately.
It was only two years later that the young girl recounted what happened. Because one of them asks: “But you don’t see Gérard Miller anymore?” So, she begins by opening up to her mother who would like to do something, but doesn’t really know what and talks about it to her husband and her brother, the uncle, who reacted very badly and advised Charlotte to file a complaint. But the young girl finds her alleged attacker too powerful, she prefers to tell herself that it’s not so serious after all. And when we push her to turn to justice, we don’t tell her how. And since she is only 17, she gives up.
Charlotte’s uncle, whom I contacted by telephone, confirms his niece’s statements and evokes his former friendship with Gérard Miller, whom he knew when he was only 17 years old: “We founded the high school action committees together I am a committed person, my mother was secretary of Family Planning, my father in counter‐espionage, and I was in the generation that made May 68. He was one of those. -there.” He tells an amusing anecdote which says a lot about the temperament of his former traveling companion. At the time, they decided with a group of friends to travel together to Denmark. Hitchhiking. Once we arrived in the country, the weather was crazy. So, his friend Gérard declared: “The weather is bad, I’m leaving again”, thus being able to leave everything without anyone planning it. […]
Taxi tickets
His contempt is with money, with notes that he engraves in marble, that he finally establishes his power. Several of them say that Miller offers to call them a taxi and, depending on their docility and his degree of domination, he hands them or throws them the money to pay for it. The technician on the setWe tried everything is not affected by her gesture but she notices it when Yasmine interprets it and feels it as a message transmitted to her, a way of lowering her even more, of finishing bringing her to her knees by treating her subtly prostitute.
At the university, it is his intellectual authority, his weapon. It is his knowing aura, his professorial platform, his speaker effects that place him in a position to manipulate. He is capable, according to the testimony of one of his students whom he did not succeed in seducing, Charlotte B., of insisting during his lectures on the importance of consent: “It is up to me something, so I don’t know if it’s to build confidence, but I remember that several times he repeated during his classes that a woman who said yes had the right to say no.” The worst part, she admits to us, is that this sentence, which she had in mind, subsequently protected her in her life as a woman.
With others, Charlotte, who became a psychologist, had spotted Gérard Miller’s ride with her students. She specifies that the lecture halls, given the disciplines, were almost exclusively filled with girls. And the lessons given by this teacher who appears on TV were introductory, for the first years. The student mentions: “He was quite insistent during classes, he made remarks to me about my makeup, about my hairstyle”, and remembers that several of them said to each other: “He’s doing his bidding.” Emilie regrets not having reported at least to the university what had happened, but she reminds us that at the time, before #MeToo, the tendency was more to make the victims feel guilty than to recommend filing a complaint. In her case, as she had been alerted, she was told afterwards: “we told you so”, “you shouldn’t go there”.
The intertitles are from the editorial staff.
Serial MillerStock, 252 pages, to be published October 16.
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