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Jailed mom writing a book about prison life
The woman who defied a court order to take her two children from Surrey to France is writing a book about her arrest and imprisonment when she returned to B.C. in April.
Nathalie Gettliffe plans to call the French-language edition “In the hell of the Canadian prisons.”
She’s reportedly writing it with the assistance of her boyfriend, French writer Francis Gruzelle, who has told supporters of Gettliffe that the book will be published by in September.
Plans are for an initial press run of 300,000 editions, 100,00 in English.
According to Internet postings by Gettliffe supporters, the book will allege Gettliffe was mistreated during her six-week stay at the Surrey Pre-trial Centre before she was transferred to the medium-security Alouette Correctional Centre for Women in Maple Ridge to await trial on child abduction charges.
The book is expected to repeat complaints by Gettliffe supporters in France that an “influential” relative of ex-husband Scott Grant was involved in arranging the necessary legal paperwork to have Gettliffe arrested when she returned to B.C. in April to complete her PhD by defending her thesis before a panel of professors at UBC.
The name cited by the supporters is in fact a Crown prosecutor who has no direct involvement with the case, but is romantically involved with Grant’s mother.
“L’affaire Gettliffe,” as it is known, has generated headlines in France, most focusing on Gettliffe’s claim that she took the couple’s children, Max and Josephine, and fled Canada in 2001 because Grant belongs to a church defined as a religious sect in France.
Grant, a Surrey man who is a member of the fundamentalist International Church of Christ, says the claim is smokescreen to divert attention away from Gettliffe’s refusal to obey the law.
Some French news accounts have described Grant as the chief financial officer of the church in Canada, when he is in fact employed as a financial planner with a private Vancouver-based firm.
In July, French authorities turned Max and Josephine over to Grant, and they returned to Surrey with their father.
Since then, the children have been making regular supervised visits to their mother at the Maple Ridge jail.
In a letter posted online, Gettliffe said the difference between the Surrey and Maple Ridge facilities was the difference between a “zoo” and a “safari.”
She complained about a May 8 lock-down of inmates that kept her sequestered in her cell while she was being held in Surrey.
One Internet posting by a Gettliffe supporter indicates it was to protect her from other inmates, who had come to believe she was “ratting them out” to the guards.
Gettliffe, who is pregnant with Gruzelle’s child, said the Alouette centre was an improvement over Surrey, but still “pretty bad.”
“Guards have total power, rules are not written anywhere, and therefore they are free to do whatever they want,” Gettliffe writes.
She complained that she was not allowed to take food back to her cell from dinner one night and was not allowed to eat when she arrived late for dinner a different night.
Gettliffe is scheduled to have another bail hearing on Friday.
At a previous hearing, she was declared a flight risk and ordered held until her trial on child abduction charges.
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