A French orthopaedic surgeon is facing legal and disciplinary action following Mediapart’s revelations that he tried to sell online an X-ray of a woman victim of the November 2015 terrorist attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris.
The X-ray showed a bullet lodged in the arm of a woman who surgeon Emmanuel Masmejean, who works at the Georges Pompidou hospital in Paris, had operated upon after she was wounded during the attack on the night of November 13th 2015, which claimed the lives of 90 people.
Masmejean had been involved in emergency operations on survivors of a wave of terrorist attacks carried out that same night in and around the French capital by terrorists acting in the name of the so-called Islamic State group. The attacks included shootings of clients of bars and restaurants, and suicide bombings, which left a total of 130 people dead and more than 400 wounded.
Following the publication on Saturday of Mediapart’s report, Arthur Dénouveaux, who presides the association for victims of the Bataclan attack, called Life for Paris, told radio station France Info: “Any patient who would see their X-rays sold on the web would be shocked, but what’s more is this continuing morbid fascination for November 13th. To see that such ideas can spring from such a dramatic event is extremely shocking.”
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The woman whose arm was X-rayed had not been asked for her consent to the sale. She lost her boyfriend in the attack at the Bataclan when gunmen burst in during a concert by the US band Eagles of Death Metal. Dénouveaux said she wished to remain anonymous, and was considering taking legal action.
Masmejean put the X-ray up for sale at 2,776.70 US dollars on the online platform OpenSea, with bids open until February 19th. The US website, which mostly features artworks for direct purchase or auction, is the principal online market for art sales using what are called non-fungible tokens, or NFTs – unique units of data registered in a blockchain –, to certify authenticity and ownership. NFTs cannot be duplicated, and OpenSea has previously featured the digital artworks by celebrated artists like Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami.
Masmejean’s sale was presented on a dedicated page on the website, entitled “EmmanuelMasmejean Collection”. The X-ray image was entitled “Bataclan terrorist attack – November 13, 2015 – Paris, France”, and a bullet is clearly identifiable alongside a bone in the woman’s arm. Masmejean, a member of the French society of orthopaedic and traumatological surgery, the French society of hand surgery, the French society of sport traumatology, and France’s national academy of surgery, declared himself to be the creator and owner of the image.
Alongside the image he wrote that on the night of November 13th 2015, “forty-one patients were referred to our center, the Teaching Georges-Pompidou European Hospital, and 22 requiring surgery were hospitalized […] I did personally operated [sic] on 5 women, including this case. This young patient, who lost her boyfriend in this attack, had an open fracture of the left forearm with a remaining bullet of Kalachnikov [sic] in soft tissues”.
Mediapart contacted Masmejean by phone on Friday in San Francisco, where he was on a short trip, when he initially burst into laughter when told the reason for the call. “This image, I haven’t sold it,” he declared. “What’s more, I’m not sure to sell it.” He then went into lengthy detail about NFTs, which he said could in the future be used for the traceability of prosthetic implants. When it was suggested to him that this did not have anything to do with putting up for sale an image from the medical file of the victim of a terrorist attack, he said he used the website as part of “a pedagogical vocation, to interest people”. When asked why, in that case, he had placed a price on it he replied: “On OpenSea, you can only put things up for sale. I regret having done it.”
He admitted he had neither sought the permission of his patient nor his employer to post the image for sale online.
Also on Friday, Mediapart contacted by phone the Paris public hospital administration, the AP-HP, which was apparently unaware of the sale on OpenSea. It replied with a statement to Mediapart on Saturday saying that it had “discovered after your call” the page featuring the image on OpenSea and described it as being “particularly problematic, shocking and indecent”. It said the AP-HP had spoken with Masmejean who had offered “an explanation that cannot be considered to be satisfactory” and that the case, which it described as an act that was “contrary to the deontological code”, would be reported to the ordre des Médecins, the French medical profession’s regulatory body.
Later on Saturday, following the publication of Mediapart’s revelations about the attempted sale, the AP-HP general director, Martin Hirsch, described it as “odious”, and announced a formal complaint would be lodged with the public prosecution services
Masmejean did indeed operate on victims of the November 13th 2015 terrorist attacks, for which 20 people are currently on trial in Paris, although in the investigating case file there is no trace of his operation on the woman featured in the X-ray.
Ten days after the attacks, he gave an interview to French public broadcaster France TV Info in which he spoke not of five patients, but “two patients”, upon who he operated for “wounds to the thigh with lesions to the sciatic nerve”. Masmejean said it had been necessary “to juggle the surgical operations and psychological support”, while adding that he was lucky to have had “marvellous patients”.
During the phone interview with Mediapart last Friday, Masmejean admitted that “from an ethical point of view, I asked myself the question” about the X-ray sale. “If you want to make me say it was mistake, it is perhaps a mistake,” he said. “What’s more, it cost me money, it’s completely daft.” On his LinkedIn page, he recently complained of the remunerations for a self-employed doctor contracted for the AP-HP. He has also denounced the “money stolen by the AP-HP” from copyright payments for scientific publications.
As for the issue of him not having asked permission from the AP-HP before posting the X-ray image on OpenSea, Masmejean told Mediapart: “One publishes elements from medical files in scientific reviews, [and] one has never asked for the authorisation of the AP-HP. That slide, I’ve presented it around the whole world, at Harvard etc.”
“No, I didn’t ask the authorisation of the person concerned,” Masmejean admitted, while claiming that the woman in question cannot be identified from the image. Mediapart then read to him the information contained in his description of it, and which contained several facts that could help identify the person. “I didn’t know that it was presented like that,” he replied. When Mediapart pointed out that it was he who wrote it, Masmejean said: “Yes, I’ve done a stupid thing. What is written there is an error, I recognise that.”
Very shortly after the interview, the surgeon sent a text message to say that he had “cancelled the sale”. When Mediapart then checked the OpenSea website, the advert was still posted, but without an asking price – which he had earlier claimed was not possible. The image was still visible during the weekend but by Sunday evening it had been removed.
On Monday, French news agency AFP interviewed lawyer Elodie Abraham who represents the unnamed woman whose arm is on the X-ray. “This doctor, not content with breaking the duty of medical secrecy towards this patient, thought it would be a good idea to describe the private life of this young woman, making her perfectly identifiable,” said Abraham. She said Masmejean called the woman on Sunday “to justify himself without expressing the slightest regret nor empathy towards her”, adding that her client had been “extremely shocked” by the events.
-------------------------
If you have information of public interest you would like to pass on to Mediapart for investigation you can contact us at this email address: enquete@mediapart.fr. If you wish to send us documents for our scrutiny via our highly secure platform please go to https://www.frenchleaks.fr/ which is presented in both English and French.
-------------------------
- The original French version of this report can be found here.
Updated English version by Graham Tearse