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- [00:04]
A
What journey leads someone to become the town psychic in modern day France? How does a woman become the supernatural confidant to a powerful man? Sofia Martinez took that path. And the powerful man, Gilles De Tor, the long standing mayor of agde.
- [00:32]
B
I'm Anna Richardson. I'm a TV presenter, journalist and a qualified hypnotherapist.
- [00:38]
A
And I'm Leo Chic. I'm a journalist and I have spent the last year investigating a peculiar relationship between a man in power and a woman with powers. This is the mystic and the Mayor Episode three.
- [00:58]
B
So I think we need a little bit of a recap at this point. Just so that I can catch my breath a bit.
- [01:03]
C
Okay, I'll lay it all out in chronological order.
- [01:06]
A
In 1997, Gilles du's father dies. He leaves behind his son Gilles and an unfinished dream of becoming mayor. 2002, Gilles becomes the mayor of AGS. He is rumored to give his commencement speech while wearing his father's jacket. From then on, Gilles runs agde. People are happy, Tourism is booming. The Catholics and the nudists and the fishermen are all living well.
- [01:32]
B
Sounds amazing.
- [01:33]
A
But then in March 2020, France goes into lockdown and Gilles tries to steer AGD through the storm. In May of 2020, a police officer in AGD introduces Gilles to a woman named Sophia. She is a medium and the officer thinks she can help Gilles communicate with his father. After that, Gilles starts seeing Sophia regularly. But he also starts getting calls from a mysterious, husky, masculine voice who claims to be the Archangel Michael and also.
- [02:05]
B
Wants to be called Papa, doesn't he?
- [02:07]
C
That's right.
- [02:08]
A
Then Gilles presides over the unveiling of the Archangel Michael statue at the cathedral in agd. We know that he sits on a throne like chair during the ceremony, which.
- [02:19]
B
We also know is very much not in keeping with that strict separation of church and state in France. That's right.
- [02:27]
C
Exactly.
- [02:28]
A
And it wasn't just the strict separation of church and state. During the ceremony, Sophia sits in the front row. Over time, the mysterious caller asks Gilles.
- [02:39]
C
To do favors for Sophia.
- [02:41]
A
And then In August of 2023, Gilles walks Sofia down the aisle at her wedding. There are reports about guests being asked to thank Papa during that ceremony.
- [02:52]
B
Now this is where it all becomes quite intriguing, doesn't it? Because obviously it's Sophia's wedding. If she had nothing to do with these phone calls and nothing to do with Archangel Michael, then surely she'd be questioning. Hang on a minute. Why are we thanking Papa? Who's Papa? So it strikes me with this whole story that we know an awful lot about Gilles. We know about him being the mayor. You know, there's a lot of testimony about who he is, but not very much much about Sofia. Why is that?
- [03:22]
C
Well, Gilles is a public figure, so there is a lot more public information about him. But over the last year, I've been trying my best to find out more about Sophia.
- [03:32]
B
Okay, and what did you find?
- [03:34]
A
Sophia was born many miles away from AGD in Alsace.
- [03:38]
D
She's obviously a good looking woman. She knows it and she likes it.
- [03:44]
A
Louise Colcombe, a journalist from Le Parisienne newspaper, has been investigating this story too.
- [03:49]
D
She's also someone very joyful. She's very outgoing. She makes friends instantly. She's really gifted at personal relationships. And that's. I think that's her, one of our powers. So, yeah, she was described to me as someone very outgoing and very nice, very generous. If she feels you feel alone, she will invite you over, buy your drink and make friendship so easily.
- [04:21]
C
What do you know about her childhood and her upbringing?
- [04:24]
D
She was abandoned by her parents. Her mother, she was around, but she was suffering from mental illness. For that part, it's not clear because there were different versions of it. She said that she suffered from sexual abuse.
- [04:43]
A
She left her birth parents. Yeah.
- [04:45]
C
And was taken into the care of the state. Is that correct?
- [04:48]
D
Yeah, she was under the age of three.
- [04:52]
B
That's really awful, isn't it, that, you know, here's a kid who was abandoned when she was three. Her mother was severely mentally unwell. I mean, ugh.
- [05:02]
C
But Louise says things started to look up for her when she joined her.
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D
Foster family, her foster parents, she considered them as their real parents. She said they would call them mom and dad. They took good care of her. She was not spoiled, but she didn't miss anything, so she was happy.
- [05:21]
B
That's a real relief, isn't it? To hear that you've got this really troubled kid, this abused kid, actually, but that she went into a very stable, happy home, by the sounds of things.
- [05:31]
A
So Louise said that she was provided.
- [05:33]
C
For and cared for. There's some stability that comes across here.
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A
But at the same time, the newspaper Midi Lieb reports that around the time that she went into foster care, she also found company in an imaginary friend called Papa.
- [05:47]
B
Oh, okay, okay. Now this is significant, isn't it? And actually really quite sinister because Papa is the name that the Archangel Michael wants Gilles to refer to him by. So the dots are starting to be connected here, right?
- [06:05]
A
Yeah, it's.
- [06:06]
C
I mean, Papa is coming up all over the shop.
- [06:08]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Which is. I mean, again, you sort of think psychologically, what's going on here? Very troubled child, abandoned by her parents. It kind of makes sense maybe that she's got this hyper focus on the name Papa and an imaginary friend.
- [06:23]
C
Yeah. And I guess you could say a lot of us had perhaps imaginary friends. But I think what kind of marks her out at this time is she said she could predict the future.
- [06:34]
B
Okay, right. So this is the age. What age are we talking about that she starts saying that I can predict the future.
- [06:39]
A
Then Louise told me it was when she was a teenager. She shared more about what Sophia was like at school.
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D
Everybody was fond of her, even the teachers. She didn't work well at school, but that's okay because she would always make a joke or something, and teachers would be really, really nice to her. They would give her good grades, even though she wasn't achieving academically. She was a seductive person. She knew how to obtain things. She could go out at night and take some. Some friends who were a bit scared, but she would say, no, let's go, let's go, let's go for an hour. And they would say, stay, like, for eight hours in a club. She could achieve anything. That friend told me she's. She's a warrior. Nothing is impossible. She says, I want this, I'm going to get it.
- [07:35]
C
People said jokingly in the schoolyard that she was like Madame Irma.
- [07:39]
D
Yeah. People in school told me that she was already at the time, she was trying to guess things and say, oh, I think you're this, that, or are you going to have this or that in your life? And everybody was laughing because it was obviously untrue. So they would joke about it, but it's. It shows how. How long she has been trying to play the fortune teller. She was trying already at the time, at 15, 16, 17 years old.
- [08:11]
B
I mean, the impression I'm getting from listening to this is actually an incredibly resilient girl, a determined young woman that is going to get what she wants. And also, do you know what? I like the sound of her. People are saying she's charismatic, she's fun to be around, she's a good friend. And she also allegedly has this ability, she thinks, as a clairvoyant, but, I mean, tell me, I didn't really understand the reference to Madame Irma. Who's Madame Ema?
- [08:39]
C
Yeah. So in France, Madame Irma is a phrase kind of synonymous with fortune teller. In the context of this. I did a bit more digging to find out why people talk about Madame Irma. And apparently it comes from a 1950s play called the Balcony. In this play, Madame Emma is the owner of a brothel and she's in the business of selling people their fantasies. She's described as someone who casts, directs and coordinates performances in a house of infinite mirrors.
- [09:10]
B
Wow. So could this have been an influence for her, do you think?
- [09:13]
C
I don't know about influence. I guess in the UK the schoolyard equivalent would be Mystic Meg.
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B
Yes.
- [09:19]
C
Is that. I don't know.
- [09:20]
B
Listen. It's not a schoolyard equivalent. I used to read Mystic Meg in the Sun. She was a ledge.
- [09:25]
C
I guess the difference here is that Madame Irma is fictional. There was no real Madame Emma. But I will say, like for this instance, it is a crazy case of life imitating art. Because in the Balcony, this play that I mentioned, her love interest is played by a police officer who has fantasies of power. But we never find out in the play if Madame Ermer is simply using him to achieve her own power.
- [09:49]
B
Ooh. Art imitating life imitating art. Because of course we know that Gilles A. He's got a position of power, he's the mayor. But he was an ex copper, wasn't he?
- [09:58]
A
He was, yeah.
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C
Police officers come up all the time in this story.
- [10:02]
B
They really do, don't they? It's quite a strange coincidence.
- [10:04]
C
I don't think it's a coincidence. I think that she was drawn to the institution for some reason.
- [10:10]
B
Do we think that maybe she was just drawn to power? Is it men in uniform? What's this about?
- [10:15]
C
Is it men in uniform? I don't know. In terms of life imitating art, as you said, there's something about that power dynamic that intrigues her.
- [10:24]
B
I've just been thinking quite a lot about what Sophia went through as a child and it was deeply, deeply traumatic for her. If you think about this three year old that's come from this abusive household and trauma can have a profound effect on a person. I've got A mate called Dr. Marta, she's a child psychologist and I'm just wondering whether we ought to give her a little bit of a call so that we can get a bird's eye expert view on Sophia and her traumatic childhood. What do you reckon?
- [10:54]
C
I think that's a really good idea. Let's do it.
- [10:55]
E
It.
- [10:58]
B
Marta, how are you?
- [10:59]
D
Hi.
- [11:00]
E
I'm good, thank you.
- [11:01]
B
So just tell us, when a child is brought up in an unsafe home, particularly if there has been trauma within that home, what kind of behaviours would a child adopt, potentially to try and protect themselves?
- [11:19]
E
I think the first thing I'd want to say is that the first, first few years of a child's life, particularly the first two years of a child life, can have a really profound and lasting effect on their development, particularly the development of their brain. So one of the things that they might adopt might be emotional detachment. Kind of act like they don't feel anything because when a child's emotions are not validated, they're not seen, they're not nurtured, then they might protect themselves by being the kind of person that, that doesn't show or express emotion at all. So they bottle everything in another way. Might be overly reliant on others. So it's the complete opposite, which is incredibly clingy. Kind of becoming quite obsessed with particular people. Perhaps people who are kind, they might fall in love very rapidly because what they're doing is seeking that kind of secure attachment that they've never had. And they will get very confused between like kindness and, and romantic love.
- [12:16]
B
Out of interest, how normal would it be for a neglected or abused child to create an imaginary world and have an imaginary friend?
- [12:26]
E
It's very normal for children to have imaginary friendships as a whole. It's actually a part of development. But children who have suffered abuse can often have a very rich imaginary world that never goes away if you like, like it just remains. So it's like their brain is protecting them by projecting a fantasy reality that they can kind of escape to when they need to. It's partly dissociation, which is detachment from reality. And it's also a kind of survival mechanism to cope with overwhelming or traumatic experiences.
- [13:05]
A
After finishing school, Sophia stayed close to home in the northeast of France. Then in her late 20s, she moved across the country to act with her then husband. They lived in a small apartment and started to make the new place into a home. She's not just a charismatic teenager playing Madame Erma in the schoolyard anymore. She's lived a life. She tells people in the town of her past, her jobs, like working as a high ranking administrator at a hospital. Sophia proudly hangs a photo of herself in a policewoman's uniform on the wall. After settling in, Sophia starts to offer medium and hypnosis sessions around town. People take notice, the word spreads that she's gifted. Gradually she starts to turn this into her full time job. Here's Louise Colcombe again.
- [13:57]
D
I found some clients and they were very, very happy about her. There was a man and he told me that at first he wouldn't believe it. His own wife did a seance with her. And she came back just transformed. Like, it's incredible. You wouldn't believe it. So he said, okay, let's try. So he went there. So he actually read to me everything that she told him during, like, 45 minutes. And it was huge. For example, he had a friend, and he was the only one when he died. And he took the dust because that person didn't want to be buried. He took the dust into the nature and he put it down under a tree. And she knew what kind of tree. She knew the story. She knew the name of that guy, how he died. And she knew that in his pocket, in his left pocket of his coat, he had a souvenir of that friend, which was a knife.
- [15:00]
B
I'm so torn at this point, because, you know, what are we saying here? It sounds as though Sophia actually is a very, very gifted clairvoyant and possibly medium. I mean, whatever we think of that, at the very least, it sounds like she's telepathic in some way, that she just has this. She couldn't possibly know that. So there is some gift of some sort here with this woman.
- [15:27]
C
Yeah. So I spoke to this other client of Sophia's, Marie, who was so forthcoming in how much peace was brought to her by Sophia.
- [15:41]
F
So my son, it was in 2020. He was 22 years old. He was a law student. There was an accident one evening, a Saturday evening. He was my only son. I loved him, as you can imagine, intensely. My son was, objectively speaking, a quite exceptional person and caring and intelligent. I raised him alone. We were extremely close. So I settled in at Sophia's. She doesn't know who I am. She has no information about me. She starts working on what we call a Ouija board. She says, does the letter K mean anything to you? So I think about my son, who was with a boy that night called Kevin. It brought me peace, and I didn't doubt it for a single second, because from the start, everything she told me, she couldn't have just guessed it. It was all correct. It's exceptionally powerful for someone who goes to psychotherapy after a bereavement because they cannot find serenity or grieve or find peace. I think that meeting with an excellent medium will have more impact than a psychologist can offer medication. So she brought me great peace.
- [17:07]
C
Marie learns things about her son's accident that she didn't know. So one thing, for instance, is she says the car that he died in was a white car. There were just details like this peppered throughout, that his birthday was coming up that they had a wonderful time when they lived in Montpellier together. So these kind of elements that are quite diverse, I would say quite varied in her life. Sophia brought them up and Marie told me, you know, that's what convinced her that her son was in the room.
- [17:37]
B
I totally get that. I mean, it's either that your son is in the room or it's that actually, Sophia just has an incredible ability to read your mind, whatever that means. Either way, it's a skill.
- [17:50]
C
So that's what we know about Sofia. Based on everything I've told you, how would you describe Sofia?
- [17:56]
B
Well, listening to what you've told me and listening to those clips, Sophia sounds like she's had a deeply troubled childhood, but that she has grown up to be a charismatic, resilient, successful woman who, I've got to be honest, sounds like she is a very gifted psychic medium.
- [18:16]
C
Well, maybe.
- [18:20]
A
On the next episode of the mystic and the Mayor is Gilles de tor all that he seems.
- [18:27]
B
They were unpleasant moments because he could be cutting in his responses.
- [18:31]
A
And has the political system in act created a perfect climate for trouble?
- [18:36]
B
This the Torres system, it has no transparency. The mystic and the Mayor was presented by me, Anna Richardson and presented, researched.
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C
And produced by me, Leo Chic.
- [18:47]
B
The series was written and produced by Palama Kaufman. Our executive producers are Kelly Windsorbergin and Ailsa Rochester.
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C
Sound design is by Craig Edmondson.
- [18:56]
B
The mystic and the Mayor is a co production between Audio Always and Bite your tongue Productions.
- [19:04]
A
I made multiple attempts to contact Gilles de Torre and Sophia Martinez through their lawyers, but they did not wish to speak on the record. The invitation to speak remains open to both of them. Gilles and Sophia and all defendants in the current investigation are presumed innocent until judgment.