A Bizarre Mistake: This Woman Is Very Much Alive, Yet No One Believes Her
A ridiculous error by French court judges has cost a 58-year-old woman named Jeanne dearly: For over three years, she's been trying to prove she's alive, but no one believes her.
An absurd mistake by the judges of a labor court in France has cost a 58-year-old woman named Jeanne dearly.
It all started in the year 2000 when Jeanne was sued for compensation by an employee she fired from her cleaning company. Seventeen years later, the employee heard that Jeanne's health was deteriorating and decided to notify the court that Jeanne had passed away.
It's unclear how the French judicial system believed her, but exactly three years ago, the court closed the case and declared Jeanne deceased, with her family required to pay the compensation she demanded.
Since then, Jeanne has been fighting vehemently for a basic right in court: to prove she is not dead and that she is indeed alive. "It's absurd that they put me in this situation," she now says. Her lawyer, Sylvain Cormier, echoes her claims. "It's a crazy story. The employee just claimed my client was dead, and the court didn't thoroughly check the claims? How is that possible? Everyone believed her without any proof, and no one thought it necessary to verify it."
Only recently, after years of a long and tangled struggle, AFP news agency sent investigators to review her documents, returning with a decisive message: Jeanne never died, and the labor court that declared her death without checking the false information it received made a grave error. "How is it that no one believes her?" say the reporters from the news agency, who dug through stacks of her documents, cross-referencing their data to show she was telling the truth. "It’s truly absurd."
