“I was really pre-suicidal.“It is with these poignant words that Agnès Buzyn decided to speak. While #MeTooHospital frees the voices of victims of sexual and sexist assault within the hospital environment, M6 broadcast, this Sunday, May 5, a shocking documentary about this. A film called. Not so white blouses and which we owe to Marie Portolano – who now officiates on Télématin. The journalist collected around ten testimonies, each more revolting and frightening than the last.
Whether they are doctors, pediatricians, nurses or students, they have all been victims of colleagues, comrades or their superiors. And this, even at the highest level. Agnès Buzyn had the bitter experience. In 2003, at the age of 40, she obtained the highest position a doctor could hope for. That of PU-PH, University Professor Hospital Practitioner. “That day, I realized the anomaly. I understood that there was a serious malfunction“, she remembers.
This moment when Agnès Buzyn’s colleagues became “berserk“
In question ? Among the 32 members, she was the only woman. Above all, by obtaining this title of Professor and despite her hard work, Agnès Buzyn has become a target. Constantly sexualized. “Agnès Buzyn came to see me in my office to talk to me about her candidacy for Professor, it’s funny, every time I see her arrive in my office, I imagine him with a whip and boots“, would have said the president of the medical community. “It’s incredible. Amazing. Being reminded of a sexual fantasy was excruciating“, confides the main interested party.
If she fought for twenty years for this title, from now on, Agnès Buzyn had another fight to fight: that of being respected. “From one day to the next, while I am the same person, while I prescribe the same things, while I do the same job as two days before, the fact of having a title, all of a sudden, drives them crazy“, says the former Minister of Health. And insists: “I sense immense aggression from my colleagues. Immense. In fact, I felt that men couldn’t stand having a woman hierarchically above two.“
Agnès Buzyn: “I thought I was going to die“
“His rise is considered intolerable and, secretly, his harassers will implement his downfall. Agnès Buzyn will experience this harassment for four years. Four years that will prove his vocation“, details Marie Portolano. It’s too much for Agnès Buzyn. This violence consumes her. “I honestly thought I was going to die. It was so violent. Such a sidelining. I was exhausted. I was really pre-suicidal“, she confirms. It was her children who allowed her to keep her head above water.
But this situation is unbearable. “It was getting so crazy that I decided to leave my profession as a doctor“, she concludes. A story that dates back around twenty years but nothing has changed. Marine Ltemporel, for example, also experienced situations that she should never have experienced. More than ever, these takes of speech are therefore necessary to move the lines So that. these phenomena can no longer be repeated.
