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‘It's destroyed a lot of lives': Families attend authorization hearings in Montreal for brainwashing class-action suit
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Lana Ponting was only 15 years old when she was admitted to the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. As a rebellious teenager, it was believed the psychiatric hospital could address her 'stubbornness and disobedience.'
Instead, she says, she was subjected to severe physical and mental abuse, along with psychiatric experimentation that would later become infamously known as the Montreal experiments.
Now 83, frail and requiring a walker, Ponting travelled from Winnipeg to be at the Montreal courthouse Monday as authorization hearings in a class-action lawsuit over the alleged abuse began.
'It's destroyed a lot of lives,' Ponting said outside the courtroom, anger in her voice. '(I want them) to see us, to feel us. I'm alive. I will not stop. I will fight until the end.'
Filed in 2019, the class-action request alleges the Canadian government funded psychiatric treatments by Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron at the institute between 1948 and 1964. The experiments were allegedly part of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program of covert mind-control.
In addition to the government, the lawsuit also targets McGill University, which was affiliated to the psychiatric hospital, and Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital.
'This is not a medical or professional malpractice case. ... This is a case of systemic abuse,' lawyer Jeff Orenstein told the court on Monday.
'When people went to the Allan Memorial, they were told they would be receiving legitimate treatment,' he added. 'Instead they were human guinea pigs.'
The defendants are contesting the class-action request, partly arguing the families waited too long to file their claims according to the law.
The Canadian government also contends that some families accepted $100,000 payments from the federal government in the 1990s, which then barred them from pursuing further legal action. They will plead their case on Tuesday.
Orenstein, for his part, argues the victims were unable to act earlier because of the trauma and psychological pain they endured. He believes the suit could grow to include several hundred people.
The lawsuit had tried to include the U.S. government as a defendant, but Quebec's Court of Appeal ruled that the U.S. cannot be sued in Canada for its alleged role in the experiments; the Supreme Court of Canada refused to review the case.
Julie Tanny, the lead plaintiff in the case, said she spent years not speaking about what happened to her father, Charles, because of the stigma attached. The few times she did, she added, she was met with disbelief.
Present for the hearing, Tanny said she still can't accept the way her father changed after his stay at the institute in 1957 to treat facial pain.
She described the warm and engaged father she once knew as having completely 'evaporated' after his treatment. He grew distant and barely recognized his children.
'For a kid, it's very traumatizing to have that relationship go away and not really understand why,' said Tanny, 71. 'It was the beginning of a nightmare for hundreds and hundreds of families.'
In court on Monday, Orenstein detailed the experiments Cameron carried out on patients, noting how they were all well-documented at the time. Rather than scientific efforts, he compared them to acts of psychological torture.
He described how patients were allegedly subjected to sensory deprivation and drug-induced comas, forced to listen to repeated audio messages on loop and to undergo extensive electroshock treatment.
In some cases, he said, people were reduced to a childlike state. Others left the hospital as 'robots with no human emotions.'
Lisa Moore, whose mother Hélène was sent to the hospital in the early 1960s, left the courtroom in tears as the alleged abuse was described, her emotions too difficult to contain.
Now 54, Moore grew up in foster care and spent decades resenting her mother for how she treated her. But hearing the extent of what she went through laid bare in court on Monday provided a new perspective.
'It wasn't her fault. They took away her ability for compassion,' said Moore, who reconciled with her mother in recent years.
'It's very overwhelming,' she added. 'I just keep imagining what it was like for her.'
