A French woman who survived the Bataclan music hall bombing in Paris in 2015 was shocked to hear that her surgeon was seeking to sell an X-ray of her injuries online, her lawyer said.
A photograph of the woman’s forearm, showing a Kalashnikov bullet stuck near the bone, was unveiled as an NFT digital artwork by a prominent orthopaedic surgeon at the Georges Pompidou hospital in Paris over the weekend.
Emmanuel Masmejean is facing legal action and a disciplinary charge for not seeking to obtain consent from his patient, whom he described as a young woman who had lost her lover in the music venue slaughter perpetrated by Islamic State terrorists. ‘This doctor, not content with breaking the duty of medical secrecy towards this patient, thought it would be a good idea to describe the private life of this young woman, making her perfectly identifiable’, said the woman’s lawyer, Elodie Abraham.
Masmejean had contacted her on Sunday ‘to justify himself without expressing the slightest regret nor empathy towards her’, she said. The woman has requested that her identity be kept private.
Also Read: WhatsApp to let users transfer chats from Android to iOS: Report
According to the Mediapart website, which originally reported the news, the photograph, which has since been pulled, was offered for sale on the OpenSea website for $2,776 (€2,446). The Bataclan assault was part of a series of gunshots and bombings that killed 130 people in Paris on the night of November 13, 2015.
NFTs are one-of-a-kind digital artworks that cannot be reproduced. They became popular last year and are currently exchanged at major auction houses, earning hundreds of millions of dollars in monthly trades.
Some have sold for millions of dollars, such as an NFT by digital artist Beeple that sold for $69.3 million (£51.2 million) at Christie’s in March last year. In December, the first SMS sent by a mobile phone, which was transmitted in 1992, was sold as an NFT at a Paris auction for €107,000.
Post Your Comments