Stuggle for Justice: The Michael Dumont Story 2020 - The Globe and Mail online -
In 1990 Michel Dumont was wrongly accused of sexual assault and sentenced to 52 month in prison. Two years later the victim changed her opinion on her attacker’s identity, but that crucial information was never disclosed. Struggle for Justice: The Michael Dumont Story, Real Stories, Youtube 45.33, 2020
The victim formerly identifies Michel Dumont as her attacker among ten other photographs of potential attackers. ibid.
‘It was no joke. I was caught up in some kind of spiral.’ ibid.
The rejection of his appeal destroys his new life. ibid.
When Solange Tremblay needed money to fight Michel Dumont's wrongful conviction for sexual assault, she sold the microwave he had given her. When director Daniel (Podz) Grou filmed that scene in L’Affaire Dumont, he showed not merely the empty microwave stand but also the crumbs of food left behind
‘If you are a person without means, you don’t get off that easily,’ Grou said, speculating how Dumont’s conviction ever happened in the first place. ‘That’s why there is a lot of attention in the film to the environment, to the little details of their lives.’
Grou’s relentless realism in depicting Dumont’s plight and the ongoing controversy over the case made L’Affaire Dumont the most-talked-about film in Quebec last year. The drama, which makes its Toronto premiere at the CinéFranco festival next week, earned seven nominations for Canadian Screen Awards and eight for Quebec’s Prix Jutra, including two best actor nominations for Marc-André Grondin, who plays the disastrously passive Dumont.
After Danielle Lechasseur was raped at knifepoint in the Montreal suburb of Boisbriand in 1990, she picked Dumont’s photo out of a lineup. An electrician who had suffered a back injury, he was scraping a living delivering groceries and lived in her neighbourhood. Lechasseur described a big man with no glasses and tattoos, which the slight and shortsighted Dumont did not have; four friends testified at his trial that he was playing cards with them that evening.
A judge discounted their testimony as unreliable and Dumont was convicted but released on bail pending an appeal. During that time, meeting his double in a local video store, Lechasseur began to doubt herself and told police that Dumont was not her assailant. Prosecutors say his lawyer, who died in 2005, was informed of that by letter, but the issue was never raised and Dumont lost his appeal. He went to jail maintaining his innocence: he served 34 months before he was paroled and could have got out earlier had he agreed to take counselling for sex offenders. The Globe and Mail online article 4 April 2013, ‘L’Affaire Dumont: a miscarriage of justice and a love story’