the posthumous assassination of jean vanier
An Open Letter To The Editor Of The Irish Times Newspaper Paul O'Neill And The Editor Of The Irish Independent Cormac Bourke
Gentlemen
You have used the term sex abuser in your various publications to describe Jean Vanier the founder of L'Arche charity who died last year aged 90 without ever being charged, accused or convicted of anything.
Your justification for using the term is not a police enquiry or a specific accusation or gawdelpus that old fashioned rigmarole we call due process in a court case.
Who needs court cases or due process, eh, when you two can just pronounce sentence in your publications!
There has been no police enquiry and no specific accusation and no accuser setting their own name publicly to an accusation and of course no court case.
Still you should be safe enough since the guy you're destroying is dead.
Dead men don't sue newspapers, eh fellahs!
All the anonymous slanders being levelled against Jean Vanier after his death have used suggestive but non specific terminology claiming without proof of any kind that he engaged in "sexual manipulation," with unnamed people who purportedly claim to have been his former girlfriends.
Sexual manipulation!
Cor blimey.
Sounds terrible.
But what is it exactly?
And did it actually happen?
Is it saying to some particularly neurotic girlfriend in April 1970: "You look lovely today. Now run down to the shops and buy me an apple."
Is it the contrived scripted ranting of some opportunistic embittered cabal of bints a la shyster American lawyer Gloria Allred waiting till a famous guy turns 90 to accuse him in incendicary language of sweet **** all as part of a by now very standard shakedown?
We don't know.
Your source for the slander is an internal report by a British consultancy firm styled GCPS and the report doesn't tell us what it means when it says Jean Vanier engaged in sexual manipulation.
Different people have different standards on these matters.
At the very least you at the Irish Times and Irish Independent should insist on specificity before you ruin someone and vitiate their life's work.
The report was commissioned by the current head of L'Arche charity Stephan Posner after a woman claiming to have been a girlfriend of Jean Vanier in the 1970s supposedly told Mr Posner that the relationship she claims she had with Jean Vanier began as consensual but later she felt it became non consensual. On foot of that supposed contact three years ago Mr Posner didn't go to the police. Instead Mr Posner claims he asked then 87 year old Jean Vanier personally about the situation and he further claims that Jean Vanier told him he did have a consensual relationship with that woman in the 1970s. Mr Posner maintains that just before Jean Vanier died last year, another woman made a similar claim to Stephan Posner about being a former girlfriend now disgruntled of Jean Vanier and that this led Stephan Posner to commission the present consultants report. So again Mr Posner saw no duty to inform the police that two women claming to be world famous nonogenerian Christian philanthropist Jean Vanier's ex girlfriends had emerged when he was on his death bed peddling claims that sometimes they felt manipulated when they were dating him a half century ago.. He didn't trouble himself with the possibility that someone might be mischievously orchestrating an opportunistic slander for profit against world famous Christian philanthropist Jean Vanier.
Someone!
Who would do such a thing in these pleasant, relaxed, fair minded modern times?
Stalkers? Fantasists? Opportunists? People who want a moment of fame? Scandal mongers? Free Masons? International Marxists? Mafiosi? Devil worshippers? Gloria Allred style shakedown artists?
All these people and groupings exist, and all harbour a visceral hatred for the Catholic Church, and all routinely use reputational destruction against elderly or deceased celebrities as their stock in trade.
Instead of going to the police, Stephan Posner preferred to commission a fishing expedition of his own, masquerading as a consultants report, a report which has no standing and has not been legally vetted by law enforcement professionals or by anyone representing Jean Vanier's legal right whether he's alive, doddery, doting, or dead to due process and which has been contrived without any apparent oversight or accountability whatsoever, and without any regard to the rights of the man whose reputation the compilers are obviously seeking to ruin in publishing it.
The report was thrown together within a few months of Jean Vanier's death.
Nice.
Mr Posner has attempted to further spice up his reputational destruction of Jean Vanier by retaining Anotine Mourges a self styled historian, to contextualise and interpret the life of Jean Vanier through the lens of a presumption of guilt and with particular reference to Jean Vanier's personal letters and reputed friendships.
The historian's commentary and contextualisation has no status in law and no relevance to the truth or falseness of the supposed statements now being published as fact by Stephan Posner on behalf of supposed ex girlfriends of Jean Vanier.
Mr Posner's main aim in retaining an historian as interpretor of evidence, since the slanders thus far are so generic and non specific and all of them anonymous, seems to have been to distract attention from the weak tendentious nature of the case being maliciously propagated against Jean Vanier, and to engineer this distraction by focussing attention on Jean Vanier's friendship with Father Thomas Philippe a priest who it is claimed had a dubious reputation and who died in 1993.
So Mr Posner is adding guilt by association to the methodology of presumption of guilt being used to slander Jean Vanier.
Again who needs due process, eh, when we have an historian on tap to manufacture and interpret guilt!
Who needs investigators when we've got sociologists!
These people are scoundrels.
One wonders why previous generations bothered with a courts system at all when Mr Posner and his hired historian and his hired consultants and his anonymous supposed ex girlfriends (also quite possibly hired) can simply and more expeditiously devise guilt behind closed doors.
I say it again.
This portion of the slandering of Jean Vanier involves nothing more than an attempt under the guise of pseudo academe to foster in the public mind an image of guilt by association.
The historian's comments are not evidence.
Let me recap.
The justification for the commissioning of the consultants' report along with an historian's commentary on Jean Vanier stems from claims by Mr Posner (currently head of the charity Jean Vanier founded) that a woman claiming to have been Jean Vanier's girlfriend in the 1970s contacted Stephan Posner three years ago when Jean Vanier was 87 and said she felt manipulated in the relationship she claimed to have had consensually with Jean Vanier in 1970. Mr Posner also claims to have been contacted by a second woman with what he calls similar claims to the first supposed ex girlfriend just before Jean Vanier died last year and that the second contact claiming to have felt manipulated in an adult relationship with Jean Vanier caused him (Stephan Posner) not to go to the police of course but to commission the present consultant's report with an historian's commentary which you Paul O'Neill and Cormac Bourke are using in the pages of the Irish Times and the Irish Independent to slander Jean Vanier as a sex abuser from beyond the grave.
Supposed ex girlfriends using the most inflammatory language to say they felt manipulated by a guy they claim they went out with fifty years ago.
And just by chance they both emerge when they guy, now a world famous Christian, is 90 years of age, dying, and then dead, and utterly unable to defend himself.
That shenanigans was the excuse for Mr Posner's fishing expedition.
Nothing in Mr Posner's contrived report can amount to justifying your use of the term sex abuser to describe Jean Vanier.
I would ask you to consider the following regarding your posthumous assassination of Jean Vanier..
1. Jean Vanier is not accused of engaging in sex with minors.
2. Jean Vanier is not accused of engaging in sex with the handicapped people in care at L'Arche community.
3. Jean Vanier is not accused by any named accuser in a court of law of non consensual sexual activity or of rape.
4. Jean Vanier was never a priest or consecrated religious person. He had no vow of celibacy.
5. The anonymous claims directed against Jean Vanier are from people who say that as adults they were his girlfriend at some time over the past sixty or seventy years.
6. There has been no police investigation into Jean Vanier. None of the slanders have been tested by a trained law enforcement investigator.
7. The police have received no accusations against Jean Vanier.
8. The source of the present ruination of his reputation alleging inappropriate sexual contact with six adult women over a thirty year period, is a report compiled in the last few months by some sort of
consultancy firm styled GCPS. No one knows if GCPS is competent to investigate criminal claims against a person. The company has no standing in law as an investigative agency.
9. Ex girlfriends or people claiming to be such often seek vengeance against former boyfriends particularly celebrities. Are we to give slanderous score settling the full status of law?
10. The GCPS consultants claim to have only spoken to 5 of the 6 women. It is not clear how they could include an unspecified allegation in their report from a sixth person whom they haven't interviewed. It is also not clear why at least one of Mr Posner's L'Arche websites claims that testimony was received from six women when the consultants report says they spoke to only five. It is not clear how the other women emerged when the initial claim from a supposed ex girlfriend was received by Mr Posner. Were they solicited? Did Mr Posner advertise for anyone wishing to make an allegation against Jean Vanier? Were the still anonymous complaints orchestrated using the methodology popularised by American shyster lawyer Gloria Allred whereby an initial false complaint is bolstered with artificial credibility as new false complainants emerge in a staged sequence over time?
11. One of the unnamed women claims to have begun a consensual adult relationship with Jean Vanier. The consultants quote her as saying: "I believe the relationship later became non consensual."
12. Jean Vanier's reputation is being destroyed posthumously with unspecified allegations.
13. There is no law against adults having relationships with each other.
14. The GCPS report includes no exculpatory material, and no advocacy on behalf of Jean Vanier. His side of the story is rendered irrelevant by GCPS' presumption of guilt.
15. It is opprobrious that one of the women claiming victimhood waited until Jean Vanier was in his late eighties to make her claims, and that another waited till he was dead. The other four supposed victims who like the first two have not been identified, supposedly emerged when the report was being contrived during the past few months.
16. GCPS are not a police body. It is not clear who their personnel are or what expertise they might have in establishing legal truth in what should be a police conducted process of investigation.
17. If the level of anonymous unvetted uncritiqued innuendo being used here to ruin Jean Vanier's reputation is allowed to prevail, who could stand? What reputation is proof against this? Do you people bear any responsibility when you collude in the score settling, opportunistic, reputational destruction of a human being?
That is all.
James Healy
Gentlemen
You have used the term sex abuser in your various publications to describe Jean Vanier the founder of L'Arche charity who died last year aged 90 without ever being charged, accused or convicted of anything.
Your justification for using the term is not a police enquiry or a specific accusation or gawdelpus that old fashioned rigmarole we call due process in a court case.
Who needs court cases or due process, eh, when you two can just pronounce sentence in your publications!
There has been no police enquiry and no specific accusation and no accuser setting their own name publicly to an accusation and of course no court case.
Still you should be safe enough since the guy you're destroying is dead.
Dead men don't sue newspapers, eh fellahs!
All the anonymous slanders being levelled against Jean Vanier after his death have used suggestive but non specific terminology claiming without proof of any kind that he engaged in "sexual manipulation," with unnamed people who purportedly claim to have been his former girlfriends.
Sexual manipulation!
Cor blimey.
Sounds terrible.
But what is it exactly?
And did it actually happen?
Is it saying to some particularly neurotic girlfriend in April 1970: "You look lovely today. Now run down to the shops and buy me an apple."
Is it the contrived scripted ranting of some opportunistic embittered cabal of bints a la shyster American lawyer Gloria Allred waiting till a famous guy turns 90 to accuse him in incendicary language of sweet **** all as part of a by now very standard shakedown?
We don't know.
Your source for the slander is an internal report by a British consultancy firm styled GCPS and the report doesn't tell us what it means when it says Jean Vanier engaged in sexual manipulation.
Different people have different standards on these matters.
At the very least you at the Irish Times and Irish Independent should insist on specificity before you ruin someone and vitiate their life's work.
The report was commissioned by the current head of L'Arche charity Stephan Posner after a woman claiming to have been a girlfriend of Jean Vanier in the 1970s supposedly told Mr Posner that the relationship she claims she had with Jean Vanier began as consensual but later she felt it became non consensual. On foot of that supposed contact three years ago Mr Posner didn't go to the police. Instead Mr Posner claims he asked then 87 year old Jean Vanier personally about the situation and he further claims that Jean Vanier told him he did have a consensual relationship with that woman in the 1970s. Mr Posner maintains that just before Jean Vanier died last year, another woman made a similar claim to Stephan Posner about being a former girlfriend now disgruntled of Jean Vanier and that this led Stephan Posner to commission the present consultants report. So again Mr Posner saw no duty to inform the police that two women claming to be world famous nonogenerian Christian philanthropist Jean Vanier's ex girlfriends had emerged when he was on his death bed peddling claims that sometimes they felt manipulated when they were dating him a half century ago.. He didn't trouble himself with the possibility that someone might be mischievously orchestrating an opportunistic slander for profit against world famous Christian philanthropist Jean Vanier.
Someone!
Who would do such a thing in these pleasant, relaxed, fair minded modern times?
Stalkers? Fantasists? Opportunists? People who want a moment of fame? Scandal mongers? Free Masons? International Marxists? Mafiosi? Devil worshippers? Gloria Allred style shakedown artists?
All these people and groupings exist, and all harbour a visceral hatred for the Catholic Church, and all routinely use reputational destruction against elderly or deceased celebrities as their stock in trade.
Instead of going to the police, Stephan Posner preferred to commission a fishing expedition of his own, masquerading as a consultants report, a report which has no standing and has not been legally vetted by law enforcement professionals or by anyone representing Jean Vanier's legal right whether he's alive, doddery, doting, or dead to due process and which has been contrived without any apparent oversight or accountability whatsoever, and without any regard to the rights of the man whose reputation the compilers are obviously seeking to ruin in publishing it.
The report was thrown together within a few months of Jean Vanier's death.
Nice.
Mr Posner has attempted to further spice up his reputational destruction of Jean Vanier by retaining Anotine Mourges a self styled historian, to contextualise and interpret the life of Jean Vanier through the lens of a presumption of guilt and with particular reference to Jean Vanier's personal letters and reputed friendships.
The historian's commentary and contextualisation has no status in law and no relevance to the truth or falseness of the supposed statements now being published as fact by Stephan Posner on behalf of supposed ex girlfriends of Jean Vanier.
Mr Posner's main aim in retaining an historian as interpretor of evidence, since the slanders thus far are so generic and non specific and all of them anonymous, seems to have been to distract attention from the weak tendentious nature of the case being maliciously propagated against Jean Vanier, and to engineer this distraction by focussing attention on Jean Vanier's friendship with Father Thomas Philippe a priest who it is claimed had a dubious reputation and who died in 1993.
So Mr Posner is adding guilt by association to the methodology of presumption of guilt being used to slander Jean Vanier.
Again who needs due process, eh, when we have an historian on tap to manufacture and interpret guilt!
Who needs investigators when we've got sociologists!
These people are scoundrels.
One wonders why previous generations bothered with a courts system at all when Mr Posner and his hired historian and his hired consultants and his anonymous supposed ex girlfriends (also quite possibly hired) can simply and more expeditiously devise guilt behind closed doors.
I say it again.
This portion of the slandering of Jean Vanier involves nothing more than an attempt under the guise of pseudo academe to foster in the public mind an image of guilt by association.
The historian's comments are not evidence.
Let me recap.
The justification for the commissioning of the consultants' report along with an historian's commentary on Jean Vanier stems from claims by Mr Posner (currently head of the charity Jean Vanier founded) that a woman claiming to have been Jean Vanier's girlfriend in the 1970s contacted Stephan Posner three years ago when Jean Vanier was 87 and said she felt manipulated in the relationship she claimed to have had consensually with Jean Vanier in 1970. Mr Posner also claims to have been contacted by a second woman with what he calls similar claims to the first supposed ex girlfriend just before Jean Vanier died last year and that the second contact claiming to have felt manipulated in an adult relationship with Jean Vanier caused him (Stephan Posner) not to go to the police of course but to commission the present consultant's report with an historian's commentary which you Paul O'Neill and Cormac Bourke are using in the pages of the Irish Times and the Irish Independent to slander Jean Vanier as a sex abuser from beyond the grave.
Supposed ex girlfriends using the most inflammatory language to say they felt manipulated by a guy they claim they went out with fifty years ago.
And just by chance they both emerge when they guy, now a world famous Christian, is 90 years of age, dying, and then dead, and utterly unable to defend himself.
That shenanigans was the excuse for Mr Posner's fishing expedition.
Nothing in Mr Posner's contrived report can amount to justifying your use of the term sex abuser to describe Jean Vanier.
I would ask you to consider the following regarding your posthumous assassination of Jean Vanier..
1. Jean Vanier is not accused of engaging in sex with minors.
2. Jean Vanier is not accused of engaging in sex with the handicapped people in care at L'Arche community.
3. Jean Vanier is not accused by any named accuser in a court of law of non consensual sexual activity or of rape.
4. Jean Vanier was never a priest or consecrated religious person. He had no vow of celibacy.
5. The anonymous claims directed against Jean Vanier are from people who say that as adults they were his girlfriend at some time over the past sixty or seventy years.
6. There has been no police investigation into Jean Vanier. None of the slanders have been tested by a trained law enforcement investigator.
7. The police have received no accusations against Jean Vanier.
8. The source of the present ruination of his reputation alleging inappropriate sexual contact with six adult women over a thirty year period, is a report compiled in the last few months by some sort of
consultancy firm styled GCPS. No one knows if GCPS is competent to investigate criminal claims against a person. The company has no standing in law as an investigative agency.
9. Ex girlfriends or people claiming to be such often seek vengeance against former boyfriends particularly celebrities. Are we to give slanderous score settling the full status of law?
10. The GCPS consultants claim to have only spoken to 5 of the 6 women. It is not clear how they could include an unspecified allegation in their report from a sixth person whom they haven't interviewed. It is also not clear why at least one of Mr Posner's L'Arche websites claims that testimony was received from six women when the consultants report says they spoke to only five. It is not clear how the other women emerged when the initial claim from a supposed ex girlfriend was received by Mr Posner. Were they solicited? Did Mr Posner advertise for anyone wishing to make an allegation against Jean Vanier? Were the still anonymous complaints orchestrated using the methodology popularised by American shyster lawyer Gloria Allred whereby an initial false complaint is bolstered with artificial credibility as new false complainants emerge in a staged sequence over time?
11. One of the unnamed women claims to have begun a consensual adult relationship with Jean Vanier. The consultants quote her as saying: "I believe the relationship later became non consensual."
12. Jean Vanier's reputation is being destroyed posthumously with unspecified allegations.
13. There is no law against adults having relationships with each other.
14. The GCPS report includes no exculpatory material, and no advocacy on behalf of Jean Vanier. His side of the story is rendered irrelevant by GCPS' presumption of guilt.
15. It is opprobrious that one of the women claiming victimhood waited until Jean Vanier was in his late eighties to make her claims, and that another waited till he was dead. The other four supposed victims who like the first two have not been identified, supposedly emerged when the report was being contrived during the past few months.
16. GCPS are not a police body. It is not clear who their personnel are or what expertise they might have in establishing legal truth in what should be a police conducted process of investigation.
17. If the level of anonymous unvetted uncritiqued innuendo being used here to ruin Jean Vanier's reputation is allowed to prevail, who could stand? What reputation is proof against this? Do you people bear any responsibility when you collude in the score settling, opportunistic, reputational destruction of a human being?
That is all.
James Healy
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