French Surgeon Attempts To Sell Terrorist Victim's X-Ray As An NFT

Chances are that if you’ve spent any time on the internet at all in the past few months, you’ve heard of NFTs by now. Even if so, there’s still a pretty good chance you don’t actually know what they are, because the concept is frankly baffling in every single aspect.

Non-fungible tokens, as they’re known in full, are completely unique digital items stored on a blockchain. What this translates to in reality is people paying astronomical amounts of money for the worst-looking jpeg of a monkey you’ve ever seen in your life, all with the added fun of immense environmental damage from the emissions caused by crypto-mining. Regardless of that, NFTs mean big money, and big companies like that a lot. Hence, it seems that they’re a trend that’s here to stay, at least for now.

Well, just to add to that list of incredibly murky morals, as reported by The Guardian, one French surgeon is currently facing legal action for attempting to sell the X-ray of a woman who survived the 2015 terrorist attack on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris. Emmanuel Masmejean did this without his patient’s consent, describing her as a young woman who'd lost her boyfriend in the massacre. According to the woman’s lawyer, he called the patient last Sunday “to justify himself without expressing the slightest regret nor empathy towards her”.

The image, which showed the woman’s forearm with a bullet lodged near the bone, was put on sale for $2776 on OpenSea, the same marketplace which recently saw several large YouTubers have their likenesses turned into NFTs and sold without their consent.

“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 Elodie Abraham, the woman’s lawyer. 

The image has thankfully been removed from the marketplace.