Pioneer in the teaching of osteopathy, Marc Bozzetto, also president and founder of a renowned center on the Côte d'Azur, was indicted for five acts of sexual assault, the prosecution said on Friday, confirming a information from the daily
Nice-Matin
.
Read also: Reports of sexual violence explode
Marc Bozzetto, against whom a complaint was filed in Canada, has withdrawn from the Atman center in Valbonne since February. "
Indicted on April 15 for five acts of sexual assault, he was placed under judicial control,
" said the prosecutor of the Republic of Grasse Fabienne Atzori to AFP.
Marc Bozzetto, 80, is the target of four complaints for sexual assault or rape which led to the opening of a judicial investigation by the Grasse public prosecutor's office and to a first police custody at the start of the procedure. In a first report from France 3 television, broadcast in February 2018, Marc Bozzetto was accused by two young women testifying anonymously. They affirmed that the practitioner had made inappropriate words and gestures "
in places that one does not want to expose
".
"
It is a normal feeling for women, but if all the women that we work on the pelvis complain, we no longer get out of it and we must stop the profession of pelvic osteopath
", replied in front of the camera. the director who, in another interview, said he was "
furious
" and unable to understand the reaction of these two students at the end of the course. These were consultations for gynecological osteopathy.
The Canadian daily
La presse
relayed in 2019 a complaint filed in 2018 by a student teacher who claimed compensation for the damage resulting from a sexual assault of which she accuses Marc Bozzetto on June 7, 2016, during a symposium. His complaint includes the Montreal College of Osteopathic Studies and its founding president Philippe Druelle. She had asked Marc Bozzetto on how to treat scars resulting from two cesarean sections and an oophorectomy.
The Atman school, which trains around 300 students in five years, presents itself as the first holistic osteopathy campus in France. Based in the technopole of Sophia Antipolis, on the Côte d'Azur, it was created in 1980 by Marc Bozzetto at a time when osteopaths were considered charlatans by the medical profession. In a press release Thursday, the manager of the Atman Center, Georges Lendel, reaffirms that "
he has the deepest respect both in the words of the complainants and in the presumption of innocence
".