PARIS (AP) – French woman Jeanne Pouchain has an unusual problem. She is officially dead. She’s been trying for three years to prove she’s alive.
The 58-year-old woman says she lives in constant fear and does not dare leave her home in the town of Saint Joseph in the Loire region. Authorities seized her car due to an unpaid debt she disputes and which is at the heart of her problems. She fears that the family furniture will be next.
Pouchain’s status prevented her and her husband, who along with her son is her legal beneficiary, from using their joint bank account. The fact that she was declared deceased deprived her of other critical facilities.
“I no longer exist,” Pouchain said by telephone. “I do nothing … I sit on the porch and write.” She called the situation “macabre”.
Pouchain’s status as a deceased is the result of a court decision in Lyon in 2017 in which she was deemed dead, although there is no death certificate. The decision comes at the end of a legal dispute with an employee of Pouchain’s former cleaning company, who demanded compensation after she lost her job 20 years ago.
But the initial complaint in the French Prudhomme workers’ court was wrongly attacked and fell on Pouchain, whose lawyer claims her company was not responsible for the dismissal. A series of lawsuits, rulings and appeals have followed up in the Cassation Court, the highest court in France, which dismissed the case outside its domain, Pouchain and her lawyer, Sylvain Cormier, said.
According to Pouchain and her lawyer, the legal errors ended in snowballing with Lyon’s ruling in 2017 that Pouchain was not among the living. The legal imbroglio is all the stranger because his or her family members did not receive a summons for the trial.
Pouchain’s husband and son left an order to pay 14,000 euros ($ 17,000) to the former employee.
Cormier, her lawyer, filed an unusual motion last Monday to overturn the Lyon appellate court’s decision in 2017 due to a “serious error” by the judges. He said he had never handled such a ‘crazy’ case.
“At first I had a hard time believing my client,” he said.
Pouchain says she cannot forgive her former employee for her plight, but will not identify the woman. The former employee’s attorney did not respond to several requests for comment.
Cormier points the finger at the judges and their ‘extreme reluctance to correct their mistake’.
“If a mistake is so big, it’s hard to admit,” he said.
Pouchain remains stubbornly hopeful that her lawyer’s attempt to block the verdict will succeed.
“This is my last chance to recover my life,” she said.