MISTAKEN IDENTITY
Sex party mix-ups, a furry false alarm, and the strange case of the woman the French authorities insist is dead
LEGALLY DEAD
Jeanne Pouchain has spent three years trying to prove she is alive after having been declared dead by a French court in 2017. A 2004 industrial tribunal had ordered Mme Pouchain, 58, to pay a former member of staff at her cleaning company £12,500 in damages. As the case was against her company and not her personally, the ruling was never enforced. In 2009, the employee sued again, but the case was thrown out of court. In 2016, believing Mme Pouchain dead, an appeal court ordered her son and husband to pay the damages instead. The following year, the employee informed the tribunal that letters to her former boss went unanswered and that she must therefore be dead. Mme Pouchain was erased from the official records.
“I have no identity papers, no health insurance, I cannot prove to the banks that I am alive… I’m nothing,” she said. “I went to see a lawyer who told me it would be quickly resolved as I had been to my doctor who certified that I was very much still alive. But because there had been a [legal] ruling, this wasn’t enough.”
As her lawyer sought to have her officially resurrected, Mme Pouchain accused the former employee of inventing her demise in an attempt to win damages from her heirs. However, the employee’s lawyer counterargued that Mme Pouchain had pretended to be dead in order to avoid paying the damages. Guardian, 12 Jan 2021.
SWINGING AFFAIRS
A sex party in Argentina was raided by police for breaching lockdown regulations when a disgruntled swinger who hadn’t been invited called police to inform them about the event. Twenty couples had paid organisers for a “sexual tour” including accommodation, meals and “several nights of fun”, to be held at a farm in Sierra de Los Padres, 250 miles (400km) south of Buenos Aires. Unfortunately, when police interrupted the proceedings on 8 January at around 10pm, they were mistakenly thought to be performers.
“When they saw us, they thought we were part of the show. [They assumed] we were strippers,” said one officer. One woman who was at the event reportedly stopped an officer as he entered the building, telling him he had “lovely eyes” and made her “feel hot”. All the guests were cited for breaches of Argentina’s current epidemic containment rules, and the organiser is expected to have to pay a significant fine.
Such cases of mistaken identity are not uncommon. In 2016, PCSO Mike Ober checked a social club in Bradford-on-Avon and was greeted by a group of women who “went wild with excitement” because they thought he was a strippergram. In December 2020, police trying to break up an allmale sex party in a room above a Brussels bar were mistaken for part of the entertainment and were propositioned by several guests. The Brussels ‘daddy orgy’, in which some of the 30 men “tried to unzip the pants of the policemen because they thought that the raid was part of the orgy”, was also notable for the presence of anti-LGBT Hungarian MEP Jozsef Szajer, a married conservative politician who allegedly tried to escape by climbing through a window and along a gutter after police arrived. Officials say he was found with
drugs in his backpack, but Szajer denied this: “The police said they had found ecstasy pills. They were not mine. I know nothing of who put them there and how,” he said in a statement. He was carrying no ID, so police followed him back to his apartment where he showed them his passport and claimed diplomatic immunity.
Organiser David Manzheley complained of rough treatment by Belgian police: “Suddenly my whole living room was full of cops,” he told reporters. “They immediately started shouting: ‘Identity card! Now!’ But we weren’t even wearing pants, how in God’s name could we quickly conjure up our identity cards?” Guests at Manzheley’s parties undress on arrival, some of them donning fetish gear, he explained. “We have Christmas coming. People are thirsty for meetings... guys in the gay community are searching for solutions to meet. We don’t sit around drinking tea. People are here for sex.”
Manzheley said he sometimes has 100 guests at his parties, including politicians from Poland, Hungary, France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Spain and Ukraine. Usually such orgies are entirely legal, but police shut this one down because it was breaking lockdown rules. Manzheley suspects police were tipped off by a rival sex party organiser.
Szajer was regarded as Hungarian prime ministerViktor Orban’s strongest voice in the
European Parliament, and an ally for over 30 years. Orban’s Fidesz party has positioned itself as a bastion of Christian family values, claiming to defend them against Western Europe’s liberal culture. It opposes equal rights for gay people. Ferenc Gyurcsany, leader of Hungary’s DK opposition party, accused the ruling party of hypocrisy: “While Fidesz politicians are teaching us about Christianity, family, traditional gender roles and morality, they are actually living a completely different life, as far away as possible from the values they voice.” independent.co.uk, 2 Dec; D.Mail, 4 Dec 2020; D.Star, 12 Jan 2021.
ROBOCAT
University of Roehampton associate professor Alan McElligott was putting some old clothes into a donation bin when he heard a ‘miaow’. He called police, who thought there might be two cats inside the container and suggested dropping in some cat food, in case the cats had been trapped for some days. When firemen came to rescue the cats, opening the bin with heavy tools, they instead found a batteryoperated FurReal Friends toy. “It was activated by touch, so after I dropped an old pair of shoes [on it], it started making noises,” said the embarrassed academic. Dr McElligott is a senior lecturer in animal behaviour. [UPI] 5 Oct 2020.