‘The Best Way to Heal Is to Share It.’ Bataclan, 10 Years Later

T
en years ago today, Ismaël El Iraki was deep in the pit of the Bataclan, reveling in the saturated guitars of an Eagles of Death Metal concert. Without warning, three Islamic State extremists wearing explosive belts stormed the historic music hall in Paris. Armed with assault rifles, they opened fire on concertgoers at close range, killing 90 people as part of a coordinated attack at sites around the French capital. 

Recalling that horrific night in a recent interview, El Iraki says at first, he thought the gunfire was a crackling speaker or pyrotechnics. Then a wave of panic swept through the crowd of 1,200 people on the main floor. When he turned around, he saw the silhouette of an ominous figure dressed in black walking straight towards him. The image, he says, is “burned into my mind.”

“It was a human shape with this bright light behind him because he’d just opened the door, and he was shooting at us. I saw people drop dead on either side of me,” he tells Rolling Stone. Miraculously, he wasn’t hit. For the next three days, he was in a dissociative daze. “I was absolutely certain everything and everyone around me was part of a hallucination,” he says. “I thought I was dead because I saw that guy shoot me – I saw it.”

El Iraki, 41, downed bottles of Jack Daniels, studied photos of the dead posted online, and “obsessively” stared at his ticket for the show, he recalls of the immediate aftermath. “Placement libre,” it said in French, meaning free to move around. “I kept thinking: ‘I’m not free,’” he says of his deep survivor’s guilt. “A lot of PTSD is going through that guilt, thinking, ‘If I’d died, someone better than me could have lived.’”

Over the last decade, El Iraki has worked hard to manage that feeling. He immersed himself in psychotherapy and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) treatment. He wrote and directed an award-winning film about trauma, Zanka Contact, and jumped back into his greatest passion: live music. The more he confronted and talked about the grim tableaus that randomly hijacked his brain, the more he felt his anxiety subside.

Still, the “sensations” can flood back out of nowhere. When legendary illustrator Drew Struzan died last month, images of his 1982 poster for horror movie The Thing (featuring a tall, menacing figure with a burst of light for a head) were all over social media. “It was like, bam! It brought me right back to the Bataclan,” he says. For years, he’d invoked that poster to describe his vision of the shooter.

“It’s like a train back to the battleground,” he says. “The sense-memory is so powerful. It pushes you back to that exact moment. Your hormones in your body are telling your brain that you’re going to die right now.”

To commemorate the 10th anniversary, El Iraki and other survivors shared their stories with Rolling Stone, recalling the attack that remains a constant presence in their lives. After feeling trapped in a maze of emotional tripwires, they describe a steadier footing. Their experiences may be different, but they’ve drawn relief, and even a measure of strength, from various coping strategies. They point to the bonds they’ve forged with fellow survivors and their return to live music. Each can pinpoint performances that reached places ordinary reasoning could not. They also credit the 10-month criminal trial, which heard testimony from hundreds of relatives and survivors and ended in June 2022 with a full slate of convictions. A decade on, they say they want to remember so others feel less alone and mark the milestone so future generations don’t forget.

“I don’t want to be known as ‘Ismaël from the Bataclan.’ But the thing is, you are,” El Iraki says. “Now it’s up to you, what are you going to do with it?” He says his movie, inspired by his own PTSD, led him to hold dozens of Q&As where filmgoers often shared their own traumas. The courageous exchanges helped ease El Iraki’s feelings of “straight up drowning” in grief. “What healed me, really, was the realization that trauma and PTSD are something you share with other people,” he says. “The best way to heal is to share it.”

“I Love You and I’m Not Going to Leave You” 

As a teenager growing up in California, Helen Wilson spent her days at the beach and her nights sneaking into shows on the Sunset Strip. After moving to New Orleans for college, she decided her future was in Paris and decamped there as an exchange student. “I didn’t speak any French and literally failed my first exam,” she says. “But within six months, I had the highest grades in the program.”

Through a friend, she got a catering assistant job with the Rolling Stones’ touring company in France. She was working another music catering gig in 2005 when Nick Alexander, a tall, British concert merchandise manager, walked up to her station. She was instantly smitten.

“He looked up at me and said, ‘I’ll have the duck,’ and I went, OK, and I walked away and forgot what he said. “I had to go back,” she remembers with a laugh. The two dated for a year, but she was in a troubled marriage at the time, and it was too much for Nick, she recalls. They drifted apart, Wilson got a divorce, and in November 2015, they reconnected when Nick traveled to Paris for the Eagles of Death Metal show.

The night before the attack, they met up and talked for hours, she recalls. He invited her to the show, and when she arrived, he brought her up on his elevated merch stand with him. They heard the first muffled shots coming from outside but had no idea they were in immediate danger.

“Then the doors flew open, and they came in shooting. Nick grabbed me and threw me down. He got hit and fell, and we just lay there,” she recalls, explaining Nick was badly wounded in the shoulder and in extreme pain. “We held on to each other, and I told him repeatedly, ‘I love you and I’m not going to leave you.’” 

After the gunmen “repeatedly sprayed the audience” with high-powered ammunition, they went to the back of the building to look for others, she says. “Hundreds of people were getting up to run, but we were on top of a riser, so we were in full light.” With Nick unable to flee on his own, they decided to play dead, she says. “Every few minutes we’d squeeze,” she recalls. “I would rather have died with him than leave him.” 

At one point, a shooter walked back and opened fire again from a position maybe six feet away, she says. Nick was shot in the stomach, and she was hit in both thighs, she recalls. “I didn’t consciously know that I’d been shot,” she explains. Her brain was fully consumed, watching the gunmen, listening to the clicks of their reloading, and consoling Nick, she says. When a man on the floor moaned, one of the gunmen “walked across into the middle of the venue and shot him in the head,” she recalls.

She felt Nick slip away and turn cold. After an extended silence – what felt like hours – she finally got up. “I kissed him and told him I was going to get help, but he was already gone,” she says. He was 36. As she opened the door, waiting to feel a bullet in her back, she finally noticed the burning in her legs. “I walked out, and all the police officers were pointing their guns at me,” she says. “I looked down, and I was completely covered with blood.”

For the next eight years, Wilson struggled with deep depression. “I was miserable. I drank a lot and did a lot of drugs,” she says. Cocaine and prescription drugs were her substances of choice. “I was mixing everything. I didn’t OD, but I didn’t care. I thought, if it happens, it’s meant to be. I was at an Olympic level of abusing my body.”

Once the owner of a thriving catering business, Wilson says a series of bad decisions caused her company to collapse. Finally, a year and a half ago, she decided she’d had enough. She flushed her drugs and poured two bottles of wine down the drain. She says her turning point traces, in part, back to the trial. Like scores of other survivors, she testified in the massive courtroom constructed from scratch for the proceeding. 

While the three militants who invaded the Bataclan all died at the scene, she was able to address 14 others accused of having a hand in the logistics. Among them was Salah Abdeslam, the sole surviving member of the 10-man team who carried out the spree of shootings and bombings. The synchronized attacks outside the Stade de France soccer stadium, at the Bataclan, and at popular restaurants packed with patrons killed 130 people and injured hundreds more.

“I got to look them in the eye. I looked at them until they looked at me. I made eye contact with them, and I told them the story the way that I lived the story,” she recalls, her voice hitching with emotion. “It’s so good to be heard and feel like you matter.” 

“It’s Chilling How Close They Got to Us”

Tony Scott’s ticket to the Eagles of Death Metal show was a birthday gift from his then-fiancée Justine Merton-Scott. The British couple flew to Paris that day and were late to the venue after stopping at a drink. When they arrived, the floor was packed, so they climbed some stairs to a corner balcony. That decision likely saved their lives.

“We heard the gunfire, but it was discombobulated. ‘Is this part of the show?’” Tony recalls thinking. Then they saw the band onstage react surprised, and someone shouted for everyone to get down. They dropped to the floor.

“It became very clear that it was gunfire,” Tony says. He moved closer to Justine and suggested they play dead. “Justine was like, ‘No, we have to get out of here,’” he recalls. They had no idea how many gunmen there were, and the death toll was rapidly rising. They crawled “commando-style” on their bellies toward a door closer to the stage.

“It was absolutely terrifying and surreal. I remember thinking, ‘Don’t look into the pit. Whatever you see, you won’t be able to unsee. Don’t look behind you. If they’re coming, you don’t want that to be the last thing you see,’” Justine recalls.   

Finally, on the other side, they found themselves under a skylight. Someone at the bottom was hoisting people up, and others on the roof were pulling people out. Justine went up first as Tony texted a message of love to his daughter. When they both made it out, they climbed through a window into a nearby apartment. They waited in silence with about 30 other people as the attackers held hostages in a stand-off with police. “We physically felt the building shake” when a SWAT team breached the building and one attacker detonated his belt, Tony says. 

Watching a documentary about the massacre later, they saw interviews with two men who helped lift them to the skylight. The men recalled seeing the gunmen reach the balcony before they barricaded the door with a fire extinguisher.

“It’s chilling how close they got to us,” Tony says. Justine believes the two men were the last to make it through the skylight. “They didn’t have to do that. They could have gotten themselves out first. In many ways, we saw more people being selfless and looking out for each other than anything else,” she says. 

“There were a handful of people orchestrating something that was set out to divide us. But while all that was going on, there were more people there helping out, showing compassion and love,” Tony says. “If there were a set of scales, the good in people that night outweighed the bad.”

“That’s How People Stay Alive”

After the attack, Tony and Justine forged ahead with their wedding plans and had a built-in support system when they returned to the live music scene. Their first gig back was a Faithless show at Manchester Arena that December. They stopped at a bar on the way, and every time the door slammed behind someone, “we’d jump six feet off our chairs,” Justine recalls. They were on edge the entire concert, watching the exits. It wasn’t until they saw the Northern Irish band Ash at a club in York in July 2016 that they finally relaxed.

“I remember coming out of that gig absolutely euphoric,” Tony says. “It was a magical moment.”

El Iraki says he felt the same tractor beam pulling him back to the concert scene. A rock aficionado, he walked into the Bataclan having tickets for shows every night the next week. After the attack, all were canceled except for one, a Tuesday night gig for the German rock band Kadavar. After his three days spent in his near-fugue state, he was determined to go.

“When I got out of the subway and was approaching the venue that Tuesday, I could hear [the music], and it sounded like war sounds to me,” he recalls. “It was horrific.” Once inside, he quickly saw other survivors. “They really brought us back to life,” he says of Kadavar. “They brought us back from a world where that sound means death and horror, to a world where it just means what it has always meant: getting together in this joyful group experience and being transcended by the music.”

El Iraki was so thankful to Kadavar, he cast them as the band playing a rock show in Zanka Contact. The movie, set in El Iraki’s birthplace of Morocco, was initially written as a retelling of his Bataclan experience. He later changed it to be more universal, with his characters confronting traumas including rape and domestic violence in a tale described by the Venice Biennale as a “punk Romeo and Juliet.” Khansa Batma, who played the film’s heroine, received the Orizzonti Best Actress award at the 2020 Venice International Film Festival.

For Wilson, the path back to live music was slower. She’d buy tickets to shows and cancel at the last minute. Or she’d go and spend the entire time at a catering table with people she knew. Like Justine and Tony, the first thing she’d do was clock the exits.

Three years ago, she started selling merch for the Atlanta hard rock band Nashville Pussy, working a few weeks whenever they’d play small clubs around Europe. Eventually, she traveled with the band to a festival in Spain. She met more people there, bought a ticket to another festival, and ended up right at the front, enjoying a guitarist’s performance. When she turned around at the end, she saw thousands of people behind her and didn’t flinch. “That set me free,” she says.

For the last few weeks, she’s been traveling in the U.S., selling merch on tour with former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett. It helps her feel close to Nick. “There are moments during shows when I just stand there and think, ‘I’m doing what you did,’” she says. “And I still have people come up to me and say they knew Nick. And we talk about him and tell stories. That’s how people stay alive.”

Wilson has become close with Nick’s family. They attended the trial together and regularly meet up for memorial events. She accompanied Nick’s sister, Zoe Alexander, to a tattoo parlor when Zoe etched the Latin phrase “Fluctuat nec mergitur” onto her wrist. Wilson already had the quote on her own arm. The official motto of Paris, it means “tossed by waves, but does not sink.”

In the days after the attack, Nick’s family went completely offline. He was the only British citizen murdered, so the attention was overwhelming. In the vacuum left by the relatives’ absence, one of Nick’s touring friends set up a GoFundMe without their knowledge. It raised more than $106,000 and became the first infusion of cash for the Nick Alexander Music Trust. The nonprofit has funded drum workshops for refugee children and programs for elderly dementia patients. It also bought 19 ukuleles for kids in a rural village. When the family later received a recording of the school’s ukulele orchestra, it was a “brilliant” way to feel close to Nick again, Zoe says.

“It Lifted a Weight Off of Me”

Like Helen, Zoe also found solace testifying at the trial. She faced the defendants, some of whom were close in age to Nick, and told his story.

“It was honestly life-changing. The juxtaposition of such brutality with such democracy – it was right there in front of you. We were all breathing the same air in the space in that courtroom. It was probably one of the most human things I’ve ever experienced,” she explains. She visited the courtroom a half-dozen times over the 10 months to support other families and survivors.

“These were our loved ones, and we just wanted [the defendants] to hear their names and stories,” she says. “We were very grateful for that opportunity. There’s no such thing as permanent closure, but it definitely shut that chapter down, I think. We can kind of park those people and move on.”

Tony, a software engineer, also testified. “It was quite a powerful experience to stand up and say whatever you like, in your own words,” he recalls. “It lifted a weight off of me.” After he addressed the court, he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was another survivor who was in the apartment above the Bataclan that night. “We cried and hugged. It was really emotional,” he says.

El Iraki attended the trial but decided not to speak. He was represented by a lawyer who entered a statement on behalf of several survivors. He wanted his allotted time to go to the families. He was there to listen.

“The Bataclan attack has been used a lot in politics in France by very racist and Islamophobic parties. It’s been a whole thing. I’m of Moroccan descent. The actual guy who shot at me … his name is Ismaël, just like me,” he explains. He wasn’t sure what to expect when the trial started in September 2021. He previously confronted EODM frontman Jesse Hughes after the lead singer claimed, during a 2016 interview with Taki’s magazine, that he “saw Muslims celebrating in the street during the attack.” The comment came after Hughes previously suggested on Fox News that the attackers had help from Bataclan security guards. (Hughes issued a public apology for his Fox News comments in March 2016, two months before the Taki’s interview was published. In a new statement to Rolling Stone, Hughes called the attack “perhaps the worst thing” that happened in his life. “I lost faith in almost everything, I lost my confidence, I lost my sanity,” he says.)

To El Iraki, Hughes’ claims in 2016 were “fucking dangerous.” “I happen to be an Arab and to look very much like one. I got a big black curly beard and the skin tone to match it. I also happen to live and breathe rock & roll,” he wrote in the caption of the 2016 Facebook post that included a photo of El Iraki in the Batalcan crowd that night. “I could not look more Muslim if I tried. But apparently, the big bad Muslim conspiracy missed me. Damn, they forgot to warn me.”

The Taki interview opened a “nasty wound,” El Iraki wrote in the post. The trial, meanwhile, did the opposite. The filmmaker says he was blown away by the “greatness of what was being said.” Hundreds spoke without resorting to “fearmongering,” he recalls. The trial held the attackers accountable without devolving into “caricatures,” and that was its strength, he says.

“Those people were terrible, horrible people, and the choice they made was terrible and horrible, but they’re not monsters. They’re not made of some other cloth. They’re humans just like us,” he says. “The families didn’t sink into hatred. They didn’t say the surviving terrorist was a monster. They offered the opposite. They said, ‘Let’s get to the bottom of this. Let’s understand why people like this can be produced by society.’ I mean, I was in awe.”

A panel of judges ultimately convicted Abdeslam of murder and sentenced him to life in prison. After defiantly declaring himself “a fighter for the Islamic State” on the first day of trial, he later asked for forgiveness, according to The New York Times. Still, he reportedly stood by claims the attacks were a response to airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.

“I Can’t Let It Destroy Something That Was so Beautiful”

Looking ahead, victims who spoke with Rolling Stone say they feel more resilient after the trial and a decade of working through their trauma. Tony and Justine will spend the anniversary in Paris, where they plan to meet up with Zoe and attend various events. The main ceremony is set for Thursday evening, with survivors and victims’ families joining French President Emmanuel Macron and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo at a newly created memorial garden by Paris City Hall.

Helen, meanwhile, is working on a new book. The title, We Have a Job to Do, is a saying she picked up from Nick’s mom. It’s a recipe book organized by stages of grief. One recipe is the first thing she ever cooked for Nick, an elevated version of pork and beans. She pairs it with memories of Nick and his death at the Bataclan.

“What happened is very sad, but I want to make it into a positive thing,” she says. “I have to. I can’t let it destroy something that was so beautiful, and something that I’ll carry with me. I won’t let it.”

El Iraki is working on a new project too. Titled Wolfmother, it’s a film noir set in the violent world of drug trafficking. Human connection and exploring different perspectives, he says, are the most effective ways of digesting his grief. “This is a prehistoric thing inside of us. If we can talk about it, recognize that we’re not alone, and recognize other people may have gone through something similar, it helps,” he says. “It shows you’re not crazy. You’re built that way – and sharing and trying to heal each other, to me, it’s the best kind of medicine there is.”

He describes feeling almost a sense of “duty to be as honest and as clear” as he can, putting his story into words, all in an effort to “transform it into something that can help others.”

With a similar focus on channeling what happened into something positive, the Nick Alexander Music Trust is holding a benefit concert at multiple venues in Colchester, outside London, later this month to mark the 10-year anniversary. Zoe recalls her brother as incredibly social, but in an understated way. She says he would hate being defined as a victim. Through concerts and the trust’s music programs, the family is actively building his legacy.

“We knew we had to change that ending,” she tells Rollling Stone. “We couldn’t just leave it there.”