Can a heart attack occurring during sexual intercourse during a business trip be considered an accident at work? Yes, recently estimated French justice. This decision was rendered by the Paris Court of Appeal on May 17, 2019, but the French media only recently learned of it.
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In February 2013, the company TSO, specialized in the construction and maintenance of railways and based in the center-north of France, dispatched a security technician for a professional trip to the town of Meung-sur-Loire, near Orleans (center).
The company then received a call from the gendarmerie stating that “Xavier” – thus identified in the legal proceedings – “in a situation of professional displacement” was found “unconscious” in his room.
“After investigation by the gendarmerie services, it turns out that he died of a heart attack on February 21, 2013 around 10 p.m. at the home of a woman he had met, after having had sex with her” , reports the judgment.
The Court of Appeal considered that it “is not disputed that Xavier… was in a situation of professional displacement”.
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However, recalls its decision, an employee is entitled to the protection provided by Social Security “during the entire time of the mission that he accomplishes for his employer, it does not matter that the accident occurs on the occasion of a professional act or an act of everyday life” – category in which a sexual relationship falls, she underlines.
Unless his employer demonstrates that the employee had then interrupted his mission for personal reasons. What he did not do, she believes, not justifying “not a schedule to which his employee would have been held nor that at the time when the discomfort arose Xavier … was subject to specific professional obligations”.
“It is right”, she adds, that the first judges “have deduced (…) that the fact that the accident occurred after a sexual relationship consumed in a place other that the room that the TSO company had reserved for him did not allow him alone to consider that the employee had placed himself outside the sphere of the employer’s authority”.
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These first judges were those of the Social Affairs Court, seized by TSO after the Health Insurance decided to take charge of this death “under professional legislation”.
For Health Insurance, “a sexual act is an act of everyday life such as taking a shower or a meal”.
TSO had initially, in 2013, challenged its decision before an amicable appeals committee, which rejected its appeal, then before the Social Affairs Court of Meaux, in the Paris region, which dismissed it again in June 2016. The company argued that “an adulterous relationship with a complete stranger” was an act “independent of his job” and asked the courts to find that this death was in no way attributable to his work.
