Paris (AFP)

"My mother died in fifteen minutes in my arms": the children and the companion of Pascale Sarolea, died at 52 years after having taken the Mediator, delivered Thursday to the court a moving testimony and a virulent attack against "the system Servier" .

Frédéric, Guillaume and Lisa Boussinot are the first to have lodged a criminal complaint against the Servier laboratories, which sold the Mediator for 33 years. It was in November 2010, six years after the death of Pascale Sarolea, respectively their partner and their mother.

Pascale Sarolea took this medicine from 2002 to 2004 to lose weight. The effect is impressive: it melts 13 kg in just over a year. But in the summer of 2002, she suffers from high blood pressure. In December 2003, she had difficulty breathing and was diagnosed with a grade 2 aortic insufficiency, serious.

On 8 March 2004, at 1:30 am, Pascale Sarolea complains that she can no longer breathe. Lisa takes her in his arms to reassure her, while her father calls the fire department. "I felt his last breath," Lisa Boussinot tells the court. His mother had to take him to college the next morning. She died of acute pulmonary edema, a sudden, unexpected death.

This family of atheists relies first on the "inevitability": "The body is a machine and stops at a moment". But in 2010, Frederic comes across an article where Brest's Irin Frachon, who revealed the Mediator scandal, describes the side effects of the drug. "It looks terribly," he says to his two children.

"So behind the death of my mother, there were officials," says Lisa, who speaks in a safe voice, with a fast flow, as not to let the emotion invade. "We decide to enter a judicial fight," says the thirty-something, who is herself a lawyer. She has also resigned from her office in Antibes to attend the trial, which is spread over seven months.

- "Cupid, misanthrope, cynic" -

The father and his two children pay a very moving tribute to Pascale, a woman of overflowing energy, a teacher in a vocational high school turned towards others. It had pleased Frédéric Boussinot from the 6th, the college where they both went, close to the court, he recalls. "My heart is tight when I tell you about her," he says.

But they are also there to express their anger against the Servier laboratories, who offered them an "indecent" compensation of 38,000 euros. "I want to denounce the Servier system," says Lisa Boussinot. Her brother speaks of a "thug" company, she of a "mafia" company that "bought the silence", who "cheated" the doctors, the patients etc. "The Servier system was violent" with the whistleblowers, sought to "discredit" the victims.

She regrets the absence of Jacques Servier, the grand chief of the firm who died in 2014: "a greedy man, misanthrope, cynical". She still denounces "the indecent debauchery of means" by the firm at trial, with "an army of lawyers, an army of typists, an army of security agents that is unbearable". Several bodyguards accompany the ex-number 2 of Servier, Jean-Philippe Seta, and the representative of the firm Emmanuel Canet. The latter scribbles on a notebook, head down.

"Damaged lives, we just do not care," she says. But Lisa Boussinot trusts this court, the president who "amazes" her in her way of leading the debates. "We are waiting for you to sanction past failures so that this scandal will not happen again ... (...) No life should be sacrificed in the name of money".

With Pascale Sarolea, this is the first time that the court evoked a death related to the Mediator. In total, the cases of 94 victims, including four homicides, will be discussed in the coming weeks. It's going to be "humanly trying," warned the president, and also "tedious".

The Mediator is held responsible for hundreds of deaths.

© 2019 AFP