Mother pleads guilty to abduction

VANCOUVER — Nathalie Gettliffe finally pleaded guilty Friday to abducting two of her children, but the French woman’s intriguing case is far from over.

There was a custody battle, an abduction to France, court proceedings in both countries, a seemingly ill-advised return to Vancouver and immediate arrest, charges that she was abused in prison, where she also gave birth to a new son in September and allegations that her Canadian ex-husband belonged to a cultish church. Recently she even announced that she wants to run for the presidency of France.

Gettliffe shuffled into B.C. Supreme Court on Friday and pleaded guilty to the charges — another chapter in a string of headline-grabbing developments.

But she wasn’t immediately sentenced because Crown lawyers said they had concerns about her mental health. They asked the court to order a psychiatric assessment.

Her defence lawyer said he’ll oppose that in court next week.

After a custody battle with ex-husband Scott Grant, Gettliffe fled to France in 2001 with the two children in contravention of a court order.

It took five years before they were returned by order of a French court.

In France, Grant won three court decisions, including one last February by the country’s top court, which said she had breached the Hague Convention on Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

But Gettliffe was only nabbed when she inexplicably returned to Canada in April to defend her PhD dissertation in linguistics at the University of British Columbia.

She was promptly arrested at the airport.

The abducted children, Max and Josephine, were reunited with their father in June.

Gettliffe has been held in custody in an institution in B.C.’s Fraser Valley institution since then. That prompted her current husband, Francis Gruzelle, to describe life in Canadian prisons as “worse than Guantanamo.”

Gettliffe and Gruzelle are reportedly writing a book called The Hell of Canadian Prisons.

Last month, to try to quell apparent growing anger in France about her alleged treatment in prison, as well as the ill-treatment charges of Gruzelle, a French senator reportedly visited the woman and her newborn son.

He told the news agency AFP that she and her son appeared in good health.

And what about the PhD that she came to defend in the first place?

Her academic committee made the unique gesture of travelling to the prison east of Vancouver, where Gettliffe gave her oral defence of her thesis.

In court on Friday, the media outnumbered spectators.

The maximum penalty under the Criminal Code is 10 years in prison.

Outside court, Gettliffe’s lawyer, Richard Fowler, declined to discuss the psychiatric assessment.

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