Dionne quint has gone penniless
Sisters awarded $4M settlement in 1998
MONTREAL • When three surviving Dionne quintuplets won a $4-million settlement from the Ontario government in 1998, Cécile Dionne never dreamt she would end up penniless, in a shabby seniors’ home in Montreal North, living as a ward of the state.
Now 82, Cécile — one of five siblings whose amazing survival made them instant world celebrities when they were born on May 28, 1934 — has a message for all seniors trusting someone else to care for their affairs:
“Make sure you know them well. And it’s difficult to know them,” she said Thursday, in the first media interview surviving sisters Cécile and Annette have given in 18 years.
While the two are close — speaking to each other by phone three or four times a day and still finishing each others’ sentences — their current lives present a study in contrasts.
Annette lives independently in a pleasant condo in South Shore St-Bruno, where she enjoys playing word search games on her computer and tinkling the ivories of her piano with songs like Over the Rainbow. Both sisters have had double hip replacements and suffer from macular degeneration but Annette appears sturdier and her vision loss is less advanced.
Cécile lives on a government pension of $1,443 a month, which barely covers the fees at her privately owned seniors’ residence on a busy boulevard in the city’s working-class north end.
Needing a walker and taking several medications, she depends on Annette’s kindness to pay for extras like haircuts and a refrigerator in her small room.
“It’s difficult, because the screening is not selective, so the people are not always easy to live with,” Cécile said.
“And the food is bad.”
“It’s tough to endure,” Annette chimed in. While the two sisters are close, Annette is unable to take on the burden of caring for Cécile, who is unable to live independently because of her severe health problems. About four years ago, Cécile was declared incapacitated by Quebec’s Public Curator, which made her a ward of the state. As such, she has no say on where she is housed.
In 1998, the Ontario government agreed to pay $4 million tax-free to the sisters, who became tourist attractions rivalling Niagara Falls when they were born near North Bay, Ont., to poor farmers Oliva and Elzire Dionne in a log cabin without running water or electricity. Taken from their parents and cared for in a hospital complex built especially for them, they were the first quintuplets to survive.
Oliva won back custody of the girls when they were nine. They moved into a 19-room mansion built by Oliva who had operated two souvenir stands near the complex. The sisters say their father sexually abused them and their mother beat them.
As adults, the intensely private quints moved to the Montreal area and shunned the media spotlight.
Two months after the sisters won the settlement in March 1998, Cécile’s son Bertrand Langlois, 55, the third of four children (Bertrand’s twin, Bruno, died at 15 months), bought a $195,000 duplex in the HochelagaMaisonneuve district in his and his mother’s names and they both moved in there.
In 2006, Bertrand sold the property for $570,000 and moved his mother into a high-end seniors’ residence on Sherbrooke St. E.
But about four years ago, the payments from her bank covering the monthly fees stopped, Cécile said. Cécile said she tried to reach Bertrand, but was unable to contact him. She has not heard from him since.
The Montreal Gazette was not able to find Langlois.
“I have no more money. So they put me under curatorship,” Cécile said.
Nathalie Gilbert, a spokeswoman for the Public Curator, said she was not empowered to talk about an individual case because of privacy laws. She said a person is placed under public curatorship only when a doctor and social worker have performed assessments that deem the person incapable of managing their own affairs.
“How incredibly tragic this is,” said Carlo Tarini, a public relations consultant involved in obtaining the Dionnes’ $4-million settlement.
The sisters were reported to have received $1 million each, with the fourth $1 million going to the children of Marie Dionne, who died in 1970. But Tarini said the payments amounted to only $750,000 each after lawyers and public relations consultants were paid.
Cécile said when she first moved into her current residence, all she could think of was finding a way to escape.
“But then I told myself, it’s ridiculous to think like that,” she said.
“I said to myself, I just have to get used to it. I got it into my head that I have to do my best to accept it and to get to know the people better. And that helps me. They’re not bad people,” she said.
“At my age, it’s difficult,” she said.
“But I clench my fists and I keep my head high.”