French Publisher Releases Book by Nathalie Gettliffe and Francis Gruzelle About Her Incarceration

By Dan Ferguson Staff Reporter
Sep 29 2006

Former Surrey resident Nathalie Gettliffe gave birth to a son named Martin in a Lower Mainland hospital on Tuesday, according to a press release issued in France by the baby’s father, Francis Gruzelle.
Gruzelle said the child bears the same name as the famed French Holocaust writer Martin Gray and like Gray, the child has survived a “particularly hostile environment.”
Gettliffe has been held in prison since she was arrested on her return to Canada in April, five years after she went to France with two children from her marriage to Surrey resident Scott Grant.

The children, Max and Josephine, were reunited with their father in June after French courts ordered their return.
The case has generated considerable controversy in France, with supporters saying Gettliffe took her children to remove them from the influence of the church her ex-husband belongs to, the International Church of Christ.
Gettliffe supporters have pointed to a 1995 French government report that declared the church a “sect.”

However the report also defined several other religious organization as sects including the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists and Transcendental Meditation without calling to have any of them outlawed.

Last week, a French publisher released a book by Gettliffe and Gruzelle about her incarceration.
Originally called “In the hell of the Canadian prisons” it is now titled “Letters from prison” and contains a series of letters from Gettliffe to Gruzelle, many complaining about her treatment while she was being held in jail, first at the Surrey Pre-trial Centre and then the medium-security Alouette Correctional Centre for Women in Maple Ridge
Gettliffe’s trial before a B.C. Supreme Court jury in Vancouver is scheduled to begin Nov. 20.