A former stuntman at Disneyland Paris has won his case against the popular leisure park after a court ruled it was guilty of “gross negligence” in not adequately protecting him from risk during dangerous stunts. The court of appeal at Versailles, west of Paris, ruled that Disneyland Paris - formerly known as Euro Disney – was not only responsible for the occupational injuries suffered by Gérard Ravenet, but also that it failed in its safety obligations to him. The verdict means that Ravenet, 50, will be entitled to maximum incapacity benefit, while the court has appointed an expert to assess the extent of the former stuntman's medical problems.
In fact, this is not the first time that Gérard Ravenet has felt compelled to take action against Disneyland Paris. In 2012 he was awarded 15,000 euros in damages and interest over sexual and mental harassment he had suffered while working at the park. His female superior at the time regularly sent him notes and comments but had became fed up with being rebuffed and decided to wallpaper the department's offices with hundreds of photos of him naked to the waist. “It lasted a month, they were everywhere,” recalls Ravenet. “From then on I knew I was going to be sacked. They were just waiting for a pretext.”
However, the legal battle that Gérard Ravenet has just won – the verdict by the Versailles appeal court was delivered in December 2015 – is of a very different nature. When Mediapart met the former stuntman as he finished a consultation at the Cochin hospital in south Paris, he gave a list of the physical injuries he has suffered. These include a back in such a bad state he had an operation on it in 2012, eyes in a terrible state and which are almost always protected by sunglasses, a damaged knee and foot, and bronchitis that has become chronic.
“It's impossible to find work,” says the former stuntman. “I can no longer remain sitting or upright for a long time. Same with driving for a long time. I can't carry loads and I'm only 50!” To make ends meet Gérard Ravenet has set up his own small business selling animal feed, which brings him in between 800 euros and 1,000 euros a month.
Ravenet, who used to sell motorbikes, worked for Disneyland Paris from 2002 until he was sacked in 2007. His job was to coordinate the Stunt Show Spectacular at the park, an attraction described by the site as a “sensational, wheel-screeching Disney stunt show featuring some familiar Disney gas guzzlers”. It features a frantic high-speed chase involving motorbikes and cars and takes place several times a day at the Disneyland site. The stuntmen leap in all directions on their machines amid clouds of smoke, with the engines at full throttle to ensure there is plenty of noise too. The show ends with a spectacular leap by a car on the roof of a lorry, while a human torch catches fire. “I was in the middle of all that for 6,500 hours, exposed to toxic products, to particles from tyres burnt during skids, to a decibel level twice above the norm,” says Gérard Revenet, who in 2002 replaced the well-known French film stuntman Rémy Julienne – who worked on The Italian Job and six Bond movies - who had just quit the show.
Aged 37 at the time he was hired to coordinate the show, Gérard Ravenet soon found himself having to take part in sections of it himself when members of his team were absent. His back suffered as a result. As part of the show he was also required to open the helmet of the 'human torch', the stuntman who was set on fire at the climax of the show. “At that moment the heat is terrible, the stuntman is doused in inflammable products. I didn't have specific protection for my face or hands apart from gloves and sunglasses,” he recalls. In one incident the searing heat caused lasting damage to his eyes. Since then the ex-stuntman has had to put drops in his eyes every day and take anti-anxiety medication - anxiolytic drugs - every night to ensure he gets some rest.
In 2002 Le Parisien newspaper reported on two spectacular accidents on the same day at the stunt show: a car missed the ramp and two vehicles collided. Gérard Ravenet, meanwhile, says that on several occasions he warned management of the risks that his team were exposed to because of inadequate equipment. These shortcomings were confirmed by several of his colleagues in witness statements given as part of the proceedings.
In 2009, not long after Ravenet's departure, a worker representative and member of the works safety committee, the CHSCT, plus two spokespeople for the drivers sounded another warning. “During the years of operation … the wear and tear and the risks taken have led to a large number of [people being unable to work],” they wrote in a letter. The workers pointed out that as it had been running for nine years “the physical consequences that stem from the show's constraints and the ageing of the stunt people allows one to consider that a stuntman has a limited [working] life on the show.” In fact the court of appeal considered that Disneyland Paris could not have been unaware of “the risk of lumbar conditions to which those who carried out the stunts on its behalf were exposed, among them M Ravenet, and that they do not explain what measures they put in operation to reduce or remove this risk”.
'My life has been wretched for ten years'
“Disney knew we were in difficulty,” says Marc (not his real name), who worked there for five years before being laid off because he was no longer able to work. Until he was forced to leave, the stunt job had been like a dream come true for the former cartographer. A fan of mechanical things but a complete novice at stunts, like Marc was trained by Remy Julienne's team, just as Gérard Ravenet had been. “At the time I was thirty and I was already taking ten minutes just to get out of bed in the morning, that should have warned me,” he says.
Marc also recalls repeated demands made to the technical services team to change shock absorbers more regularly, adapt the bucket seats – the security seats used for the drivers – and improve the drivers' outfits. In particular Marc highlights the relentlessness frequency of the show. “In fact, it's really a question of tempo: the car absorbs the shock but to play it three, five times a day, you need technical solutions for that!” he says. The stuntman finally realised the full dangers after one fall too many. “We were supposed to jump off the roof of a house onto a lorry, the stunt didn't work because of a technical problem. I fell further than expected and broke a lumbar vertebra.
Years after he was made redundant, Marc's still young body has been slowly falling apart. The muscles have gone to be replaced by a “massive skipped disc”, he is obliged to take lots of pills, has undergone many x-rays and has a whole heap of doctor's notes. “But my handicap is not recognised as an occupational injury, and that's what I'm fighting for. Yet my life has been wretched for ten years. I can't bathe my children or pick up my little two-year-old boy if he falls in the street, can you imagine that?”
Disneyland Paris insists that safety conditions have been upgraded. “Among the measures taken to improve security and prevent risks in recent years, we have in particular improved the stunt equipment (construction of special cars for the jumps, special shock absorbers, adapted seats, ultra-secure suits outfits for the drivers...) and taken measures to avoid phenomena arising from the routine (rotation system, adapted hours),” its management wrote to Mediapart.
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But another stuntman, who left the theme park recently, says that while “on the vehicles, the motorbikes, it's better, when it comes to equipment for people, it's still too little”. He worked on the shows for around ten years, playing every role “from villain to hero”. When he left he agreed to accept a large cheque from Disney, undertaking not to take legal action against the company. “I'm pretty well, let's say my body withstood it better than others. But clearly the safety conditions played a role in my desire to leave the company,” he adds.
This stuntman raises another concern, one which has also been mentioned by his former colleagues, about the stunt performers' training, which is done internally by the most experienced members of the team. “Due to an oversight or with a desire to save money,” he says. A renowned stuntman for 30 years, Louis-Marc Marty, who is head of the stunt training school Action Training Productions, was involved twice with Disneyland Paris. This was at the creation of the show, at the start of the 2000s, and was to do with adjusting the heights of the stunt falls.
“I have not been back because I was too expensive, according to Disney,” he noted in a document written in 2014 and which Mediapart has read. “Instead, they have a kind of improvised teaching, the best train the others. But with stunts you don't improvise. Yet in this team the stunt people are left to their own devices, they don't train enough.”
In the same document Louis-Marc Marty makes a broader call for the stunt world to be made more professional. “Every company … that uses people performing stunts must offer its staff a minimum training of six months for each stunt action, with permanent evaluations in order to check that the standard remains at the right level.” However, Disneyland gives a different version of its training system. They say that the stunt performers “perform in the Park with maximum training and under maximum safety conditions. They are trained in a continual manner and supervised by internal and external professionals, as well as by firefighters for training in putting out fires”.
But because of the falls and the pain they suffer, the stunt performers are regularly forced to take time off work. In a document from the workplace health service at Disneyland a doctor did the calculations in relation to Gérard Ravenet, who chalked up 40 visits to the doctor in five years, for neck problems, back problems, shoulder problems and “hydrarthrosis of the knee” - knee swelling. Former stuntman Marc has also done his sums and calculates that he had a cumulative total of six months off work because of injuries during five years of working there. The doctor in question is a sports medic who worked at Disneyland – he is now retired and according to Mediapart's information is in dispute with Disneyland – and regularly used osteopathy to treat stunt performers. According to several people spoken to by Mediapart, he also gave his patients muscle relaxants without prescription.
“Each time we fell, we saw this guy there,” says Gérard Ravenet. “But when there were accidents at work Disney told us to declare ourselves off sick, a way of not making the rates [of injuries] rise and thus avoiding fines.” Another technique is described by a former colleague of Ravenet: “When you returned from a work accident, you were declared fit to resume [work] but even so we were forbidden from doing the stunts. We went to have a walk in the park or swim in the pool, just so as not to bump up the statistics.”
On its website Disneyland Paris promotes the job of a stuntman, stating in its English-language version: “... the Disney® stuntman holds a very physical role and respects safety rules very accurately.” It also quotes a stuntman called Jérémy, who used to be a fireman with the company, as saying: “This is an opportunity to have an uncommon job, it's fantastic! I know that these are my golden years, they won't last forever, but I love every minute of it...” For those on the inside, the magic of Disney does not last long.
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- The French version of this story can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter