Bataclan survivor shocked as surgeon tries to sell her X-ray as NFT

A French woman who survived the 2015 attack on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris was “extremely shocked” after learning that her surgeon was attempting to sell an X-ray of her injuries online, her lawyer has said.

A senior orthopedic surgeon at the Georges Pompidou hospital in Paris was revealed at the weekend to be offering an image of the woman’s forearm, showing a Kalashnikov bullet lodged near the bone, as an NFT digital artwork.

Emmanuel Masmejean faces legal action and a disciplinary charge having not asked for permission from his patient, whom he described as a young woman who had lost her boyfriend in the massacre by Islamic State gunmen at the music venue.

“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.

She said Masmejean had called the woman on Sunday “to justify himself without expressing the slightest regret nor empathy towards her”. The woman has asked to remain anonymous.

The image, which has now been withdrawn, was offered for sale for $2,776 (€2,446) on the OpenSea website, according to the Mediapart website, which first reported the story.

The attack on the Bataclan was part of a wave of shootings and bomb attacks in the French capital on the night of 13 November 2015 that claimed 130 lives.

NFTs are digital artworks that cannot be duplicated. They burst into the mainstream last year and are now traded at major auction houses, generating several hundred million dollars in transactions every month.

Some have sold for millions, including an NFT by the digital artist Beeple that went under the hammer at Christie’s in March last year for $69.3m (£51.2m).

The first SMS ever sent by a mobile phone in 1992 was sold in December as an NFT at a Paris auction for €107,000.