Montreal Teacher Fired After Students Find Her 40-Year-Old Nude Scenes

A 73-year-old teacher at a prestigious Christian secondary school in Canada has been fired after several of her students discovered nude scenes she filmed more than 40 years ago.

Jacqueline Laurent-Auger has been a drama teacher for 15 years at Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, an elite private school for boys. Some of those boys—who were presumably online looking for Bible verses or chicken soup recipes or very early Mother’s Day gifts—somehow managed to stumble across Laurent-Auger’s acting work from the ’60s and ’70s, when she was a young actress in Europe, appearing in films like Le journal intime d’une nymphomane (The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac), and according to her IMDB page, Swedish Sex Games and Nathalie: Escape from Hell.

The films aren’t pornographic, Laurent-Auger told the Globe and Mail newspaper, more like soft-core in the style that movies in the ’60s and ’70s often were. (Also, they were filmed 40 years ago.) But none of that particularly mattered to Brébeuf; Laurent-Auger says she was told by school officials in July that her contract would not be renewed. She asked if there was any issue with her teaching performance and was told no, there was not.

In a statement to the Globe and Mail, the college blamed Laurent-Auger and the Internet in equal parts, writing, “the availability on the Internet of erotic films in which she acted created an entirely new context that was not ideal for our students. After discussion and reflection, we concluded that adult films must remain just that, a product for adults. That’s why we decided not to renew Mrs. Laurent-Auger’s contract.” The statement also said her “erotic scenes” called her judgement into question, given that they were not “models to follow for high-school students becoming initiated into theatre and arts in general.”

Laurent-Auger’s story has been met with widespread sympathy in Canada; one columnist called the decision “so unfair I can hardly believe it,” adding, “obviously for Brebeuf College, prestige is not always combined with good judgment.”

For her part, Laurent-Auger seems both furious and, appropriately, not particularly repentant for the imaginary sin of being naked half a century ago.

“This is petty and small-minded,” she told the Globe and Mail. “We’re in the year 2014, not 1950.”