When MAUREEN KEARNEY stumbled across corruption she was subjected to a brutal assault

For years, Maureen Kearney struggled to speak about the vicious attack and sexual assault she suffered in her own home by an unknown assailant, because, she says, ‘When you think you are going to die, the words are just not there.’ 

In fact, for a long period, she could barely remember it, or recall much of her life before it happened. Her body was protecting her, blocking a trauma that felt too big to process. 

‘Everything before 17 December 2012 was blank,’ she says. ‘I was stuck on that date.’

Eleven years on, though, not only can she talk about it, her story has been told in a book in France. And now it has been turned into a film, The Sitting Duck, a taut thriller that will be released in the UK in June.

Kearney is played by Isabelle Huppert, one of the most famous actresses in France. Watching the attack re-created on film hasn’t been easy – the first time, Kearney had to walk out of the screening – but she’s glad it’s out there. 

‘It was the hardest part of my life but it’s in the past,’ says Kearney, now 67. ‘If it can help one woman, then it’s worth it.’

It’s an incredible story of trauma and survival, but also of corporate corruption, government lies and the terrifying consequences of being a whistleblower.

In fact, The Sitting Duck’s plot would be deemed too far-fetched were it not true – few would believe Kearney’s ordeal could happen in a modern Western democracy.

Although it took place in Paris, Kearney is Irish. Born and raised in County Mayo, but always drawn to French culture, in the 1970s she won a grant to study at university in Aix-en-Provence, then met and married a Frenchman, Gilles Hugo. 

They settled in Paris, where Hugo was CEO of a sound production company, and raised two children while Kearney also taught English to employees at the nuclear engineering company Areva. 

When she noticed that her students were suffering under the company’s lay-off scheme, she began advocating on their behalf, eventually rising to become a powerful, outspoken trade unionist within France’s nuclear industry.

It was in this role, in 2011, that Kearney learned of a top-secret contract involving Areva, the French state-owned utility company Electricité de France (EDF) and China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGNPC). If true, it meant major job losses at Areva as well as the transfer of sensitive nuclear technology from France to China.

‘I had extensive networking powers – journalists, politicians – so I started ringing around, trying to find out what was going on,’ says Kearney. 

First she was assured by bosses and government ministers that the deal had been halted, but months later someone sent her a copy of the contract with a photo of it being signed. 

‘I asked for an extraordinary meeting with the CEO at Areva,’ she says, ‘and at that meeting I was far too direct, I realise that now. He said that there was no contract. I told him he was a liar and that I had proof.’

Kearney realised that there might be professional consequences; that she might come under pressure at work. ‘It was a stressful time but you certainly never think you’re in physical danger.’ Around this time, she began receiving anonymous phone calls – in one, a message was left to ‘mind your own business’, which she played to several people. 

Her adult children were also noticing strange happenings. ‘My daughter had said that when she drove to see us, she was followed by another car. We told her not to be ridiculous. It didn’t seem real or possible. On the night before I was attacked, there was a car parked outside my son’s house for hours. When he went out to see who it was, it drove off really fast.’

Her story has been turned into a film, The Sitting Duck, a taut thriller that will be released in the UK in June. Pictured: Isabelle Huppert as Kearney in The Sitting Duck

On 17 December 2012, a typical busy Monday morning, Kearney’s life crossed into the realms of a horror film. Hugo had left for work and Kearney was brushing her teeth in the downstairs bathroom. 

‘My mind was elsewhere, I wasn’t alert,’ she says. ‘Why would I be?’ Suddenly, a dark cover was pulled over her head and she felt what seemed to be a gun in her back.

‘I don’t remember my thoughts at all, but I remember my heart,’ she says. ‘It was beating so fast that I thought it was going to come out through my chest. I could hear the blood in my ears. It was the weirdest feeling.’

Kearney was taken to the living room and tied to a chair. Her attacker told her, ‘This is your second warning. There won’t be a third.’ Using a knife, he carved an A on her stomach – perhaps for Areva or avertissement, the French word for ‘warning’.

Kearney had no idea what he was doing. ‘I felt nothing after that,’ she says. ‘I was convinced my intestines were on my lap. I just went elsewhere, I don’t know where, but I wasn’t there.’

When her housekeeper arrived, six hours later, she found Kearney still tied to the chair with the knife inserted handle-first into her vagina. Kearney had passed out – at first the housekeeper thought she was dead.

From this day forward, for years to come, Kearney’s life stopped making sense – it was, she says, ‘like an attack on reason’. Very early on, she felt that she wasn’t believed by police, and within weeks Kearney and Hugo were called into a station and separated on arrival. 

‘The police then told me that I’d made the whole thing up,’ she says. Kearney was told – falsely – that her husband, friends and colleagues all thought she was lying too. After more than ten hours of interrogation, the police left the room and a man in civilian clothes entered. 

Now Kearney was threatened again. ‘He told me that if I didn’t say I’d made it up, a steamroller would flatten my family and we’d never get back up.’ Petrified, exhausted, Kearney signed a statement saying that she had imagined the attack. 

She was then allowed home and given a week to produce a more detailed, convincing confession. When she couldn’t produce one, she was charged with the false reporting of a crime – the French equivalent of wasting police time.

The case took four years to come to court, and Kearney spent them in a desperate search for safety. ‘I lived in dread, terrified all the time. I hadn’t been protected. I hadn’t been believed. I knew if anything happened again, there was nowhere to go for help.’

She never returned to work. When her husband had to leave the house, friends took turns to be with her – she wasn’t alone for two years.

‘I couldn’t eat. I was so bad that the doctor gave me a liquid supplement for anorexic people. I couldn’t sleep for more than an hour. I’d be awake, listening. Any sound I didn’t recognise would panic me. I couldn’t stay in that house.’

In the autumn of 2013, she and Hugo – who had never doubted her – moved out of Paris, 400km away to a small town south of the Loire. Kearney couldn’t have any dining room chairs in her new home, no chairs that she could feasibly be tied to.

She was unable to go to the hairdresser, as staying seated with someone behind her was too terrifying. ‘I was in survival mode, living minute to minute, hour by hour, day by day.’

The case was heard by a judge at the Criminal Court of Versailles in May 2017. Kearney was still in ‘survival mode’, and fell apart on the stand, barely able to speak.

In a 2010 photo proving that a deal took place, the Areva and China General Nuclear Power Corporation CEOs sit together, as Chinese President Hu Jintao and French President Nicolas Sarkozy look on

The police claimed that there had been no DNA at the scene – no fingerprints, no witnesses. Kearney was found guilty, given a five-month suspended sentence and a €5,000 fine (then around £4,200).

What kept her going? ‘I held on to the fact that I knew I was attacked andI couldn’t accept that I was not believed,’ she says. 

Finding a military psychiatrist who specialised in post-traumatic stress disorder was a huge step forward. He believed Kearney’s account, offered to testify in court on her behalf and helped her understand that her paralysis was a normal response to trauma. ‘For the first time, in my sessions with him, I was able to talk about the attack. He got me back,’ she says.

Supported by her employment union, Kearney appealed her conviction and had plenty of evidence to support her case. Her lawyer discovered that the DNA taken from the scene had never returned from the lab – it had been lost. 

Neighbours had reported a white van outside the house that was never investigated. Most chillingly, an identical attack had been reported six years earlier by the wife of another whistleblower in the French energy industry. 

She had been raped and a coffin had been engraved on her stomach. It was investigated by the same prosecutor’s office and the file had disappeared. It had never reached trial.

Kearney’s appeal was successful. Her acquittal was the start of her recovery – but there are no simple ‘happy endings’ here, only many unanswered questions. Her attacker has never been identified and Kearney chose not to pursue it. ‘I was told an investigation would take years, and it would be the same police, the same court area that had accused me of making it up. There was no way I could go back to that.’

The nuclear deal with China went ahead – the French and Chinese have built reactors together, 5,000 jobs were lost at Areva, and today the company no longer exists. Kearney still isn’t sure what she was uncovering that could have led to her attack. She can only assume she had stumbled towards more than she realised.

Slowly, she has built a new life in rural France. For eight years, she taught at a local nursery. ‘Being with children was so helpful, as you have to stay in the moment,’ she says. She also volunteers at a women’s refuge.

‘I’m giving something back. I received so much support from my friends and family. For years I was never on my own and I didn’t realise how lucky I was. At the refuge, we see women who are really isolated, who don’t have support. We’re helping them find a secure place.’

Her home has dining chairs now – they are transparent and light enough to move, even if you’re tied to one. 

Kearney still struggles with the hairdresser, though. ‘I haven’t been for nearly a year but I keep saying I’m going to make an appointment.’ 

Still, she is happy. ‘It takes a long time, a lot of pain and suffering, a lot of therapy and there’s no magic pill,’ she says. ‘But I want women to know that you can get through.’

• The Sitting Duck is scheduled for release in cinemas on 30 June