For Patrice de Maistre, the publication of Bonnefoy’s recordings signaled a “descent into hell.” Not only was the financier personally implicated in tax-evasion schemes, political payments, and a humiliating request for the “boat of his dreams,” but his employer was shown to be fragile, confused, often unable to follow the details of the complicated legal schemes concocted by her advisers. In short, the situation of Madame Bettencourt in the face of her daughter’s suit was becoming untenable. In June 2010, de Maistre turned to the one man he knew who might be able to fix the mess: Pascal Wilhelm.
Wilhelm, then forty-nine, had been de Maistre’s personal lawyer since 1996. Their professional relationship was amicable, but there was no real friendship between them. They came from different worlds: The financier was a patrician, hunter, yachtsman, and member of France’s most exclusive clubs; the lawyer was the self-made son of a Jewish clothier from the Paris suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne. His favorite sport was not sailing, but judo—the art of using an opponent’s strength against him.
A specialist in conflict resolution, Wilhelm boasted a list of blue-chip clients and contacts that made him one of the most influential members of the Paris bar, though he rarely appeared in a courtroom. His method was to make deals, solve problems, and reach settlements. Short of stature with slightly graying black hair and intense black eyes, he likes to describe himself as a man of “strong temperament.” A passionate student of French history—he published a biography of the Revolutionary pamphleteer Camille Desmoulins in 2015—Wilhelm had already played an indirect role in the case by recommending Georges Kiejman to defend Madame Bettencourt’s interests. Now de Maistre was appealing to him to find a way out of the morass that was engulfing the house of Bettencourt.
In early July 2010, Wilhelm met with the eighty-seven-year-old heiress for the first time in the central reception room of her home in Neuilly. Known as the salon rond because of its semicircular shape, the room looks out on the garden through three glass doors framed by tan draperies. It is furnished with a large beige sofa and matching armchairs, a grand piano topped with family photos, and Art Deco furniture by Ruhlmann. The polished wood coffee table is covered with art books, two black stone bird sculptures, and a large bouquet of sunflowers that recalls a Van Gogh painting. There are no actual Van Goghs on the walls, but Wilhelm was impressed by the Picasso, Braque, and de Chirico works on display, as well as the tall Matisse drawing that hung alongside the stairway.
As soon as Liliane descended the curved stairway, Wilhelm was struck by her regal bearing—“majestic like the queen of England.”
Liliane sat next to him on the sofa and got right to the point. “Voilà, Monsieur. What should we do?”
“Madame,” said Wilhelm, “your biggest problem is the Swiss bank accounts and the Île d’Arros. You have to regularize all that immediately.”
“Can you take care of it?”
Of course he could. Wilhelm contacted the Finance Ministry and began a discussion aimed at settling Liliane’s dodgy tax situation with the least possible damage. At the same time he managed, with great difficulty, to dissolve the foundation in Lichtenstein that legally controlled the Île d’Arros and transfer the ownership back to Madame Bettencourt, declaring that exotic asset to French tax authorities for the first time. In all, he brought €101 million in Swiss-held funds back to France. Taxes and penalties amounted to about half of that amount, but Wilhelm managed to avoid criminal charges and fines for tax evasion.
Then came the hard part: how to deal with Françoise Meyers’s legal challenge. In mid-July, Liliane invited Wilhelm to Cap de Formentor to discuss the case. As soon as he was ushered into the heiress’s hilltop villa, he was struck by her solitude. Apart from her domestic servants and her dog, she was completely alone. André was gone. Banier had been banished from her life, along with Martin d’Orgeval, for whom she had a tender spot. Her grandsons were uninterested in Formentor. As for Françoise and Jean-Pierre, God forbid . . .
Madame Bettencourt and the lawyer shared a light luncheon on the rear patio overlooking the swimming pool. Wilhelm sensed that his host was almost as grateful for the company as for the legal advice he could give.
“I can’t continue with this situation,” Liliane told him. “How can I work things out with my daughter? I don’t have a life.”
“Madame Bettencourt, you must begin by threatening her, and afterward, if she wants to discuss it, reach an agreement. It’s imperative.”
“Threaten her? How?”
“Threaten to take back the L’Oréal shares you gave her.”
The idea had been bandied about earlier between Liliane and her advisers, but was considered too complicated legally. Now the heiress seemed to embrace this tactic. She asked Wilhelm to prepare a letter that threatened, in effect, to disinherit her daughter. But when she read Wilhelm’s draft text, she found it “too violent.” “I’ve thought this over,” she told him. “It’s too dangerous for L’Oréal.” As an alternative, Wilhelm proposed to reach out to her daughter’s lawyer and work out a deal. The heiress assented.
In late August, Wilhelm contacted Didier Martin, Françoise’s business lawyer, and proposed to negotiate a peaceful settlement between mother and daughter. Martin agreed that it was the right solution, but said it was “too soon”—he would need time to bring his client around. Discreet discussions continued and the two men finally launched into an intense phase of negotiations, meeting several times a week, either at Wilhelm’s posh headquarters overlooking the Parc Monceau or more often at Martin’s offices on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, two blocks from the Élysée Palace. The talks were carried out in such strict secrecy that both Olivier Metzner and Georges Kiejman, the rival criminal lawyers for Françoise and Liliane respectively, were left out of the loop.
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Meanwhile, de Maistre sought Wilhelm’s help in devising a media strategy to counter the devastating “Mamie Zinzin” image resulting from the illicit recordings. In June 2010, they contacted two communications specialists: publicist Laurent Obadia, a friend and client of Wilhelm’s; and Marion Bougeard, a crisis-management expert who had previously advised Kiejman. Working together under the aegis of Obadia’s company, Opus Conseil, they set up a series of TV and print interviews aiming, in Obadia’s words, to show that “the recordings did not reflect the true state of [Madame Bettencourt’s] health.” For their services, Opus Conseil received a whopping monthly fee of €80,000.
The results of this pricey campaign were mixed. Because of her deafness and memory lapses, Liliane had to be primed for the interviews with questions and answers prepared in advance by the media team. Marion Bougeard got directly involved in editing the taped TV interviews, telling the journalists where to cut and splice to make Madame Bettencourt seem more “punchy.” On the print interviews, Bougeard admitted that she herself “reworked and amended” the texts.
The attempt to make the heiress appear spontaneous and dynamic backfired badly in some cases. For example, her media advisers contacted Le Monde on June 17 to offer up an interview. The paper sent one of its top reporters, Michel Guerrin, to Neuilly the next day. But Guerrin was abruptly ejected after twenty minutes by Patrice de Maistre, who was annoyed by questions concerning the undeclared Île d’Arros. “Madame is not interested in that,” he snapped. “You can’t get into those details.” Marion Bougeard then stepped in and told Guerrin to email his remaining questions so Liliane could reply in writing. But the completed text she sent back to the journalist was largely written by Bougeard herself, with Madame Bettencourt supposedly “looking over [her] shoulder” while she typed. Le Monde published the interview the next day with a full account of the bizarre circumstances that surrounded it.
The televised interviews posed a special problem. The questioners had to sit directly in front of the heiress and speak slowly so she could read their lips. Her answers were hard to understand because of her soft voice and laborious articulation. One high-profile interview, with TF1’s star anchorwoman Claire Chazal, was marred by Madame Bettencourt’s constant head-turning to look at someone who was apparently standing off-camera to her right. It was later revealed that this was the network’s news producer, prompting her answers from the sidelines.
The main thing most viewers retained from the TF1 interview, conducted at Liliane’s Arcouest villa, was her baffling use of a German word associated with the Occupation and the persecution of the Jews: Raus! (“get out of here,” as in Juden Raus!). That interjection came in response to a question about the astronomical sums she had given Banier. “So what?” she said. “You want me to take it all back? You can’t always count everything. The only thing that counts is people who work. As for the others, Raus!” Her incongruous use of that word lit up the Internet with tens of thousands of reactions and inevitably recalled the dark past of L’Oréal’s founder. “Liliane Bettencourt must have taken German lessons along with her father Eugène Schueller,” commented one contributor to a Jewish web forum, who went on to recount Schueller’s wartime support of collaborationist groups and André Bettencourt’s anti-Semitic articles. Not exactly the kind of image buffing that the heiress and her entourage had in mind.
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Meanwhile, Nanterre prosecutor Courroye and Judge Prévost-Desprez pursued their parallel—and rival—investigations. During her interrogation of Françoise Meyers on July 20, 2010, Prévost-Desprez first learned the details of her secret financial arrangement with Claire Thibout: the €400,000 paid to the accountant in accordance, she said, with her father’s wishes. Meyers explained that she considered this part of Thibout’s severance indemnity, not a payment for her cooperation.
Prévost-Desprez, who admits having a certain sympathy for Madame Bettencourt’s ill-loved daughter, explained to her that the so-called indemnity “poses a problem, because everybody is going to say you paid for her testimony.” Françoise seemed not to grasp the full reality of this risk. “I sensed there were moments when I had to bring her back to planet Earth,” says the judge.
Eight days later, a police search of the Meyers apartment turned up the famous letter of July 11, 2007, in which Françoise promised to round up Thibout’s severance package to €800,000 if she was fired. In the event, the indemnity paid by Liliane’s lawyers in December 2008 was €400,000; as promised, Françoise paid her an additional €400,000. Once the news of this deal filtered out, Banier’s lawyers filed a complaint against Madame Meyers on September 20, 2010, for suborning a witness.
By this time, the jurisdictional battle between Prosecutor Courroye and Judge Prévost-Desprez was moving toward a climax. Courroye’s ally in this combat was Georges Kiejman, who shared the prosecutor’s aim of getting the “little judge” yanked off the case. On September 1, 2010, Kiejman phoned Courroye and railed about an article that had just appeared in Le Monde. The afternoon newspaper had just published a well-informed account of a police search of the Bettencourt home, carried out earlier that day on orders of Judge Prévost-Desprez. This and other Le Monde articles contained investigative material that could only have come from the judge, fumed Kiejman, who immediately filed a complaint for “violation of professional secrets.”
Courroye, only too eager to confound his nemesis, ordered police to search the phone records of the journalists in question. The probe, of questionable legality, turned up fifty-seven text messages between Prévost-Desprez and one of the Le Monde reporters. Armed with that information, Courroye launched a formal investigation against the judge.
At this point, government authorities stepped in to put a sudden end to the catfight between Courroye and Prévost-Desprez. As Sarkozy’s judicial adviser Patrick Ouart puts it, “the Nanterre tribunal had become a boxing ring.” In early November, Justice Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie, prodded by Sarkozy, ordered all Bettencourt-related investigations moved to a neutral jurisdiction. On November 17, 2010, the cases were transferred from Nanterre to Bordeaux “in the interest of a good administration of justice.” Prévost-Desprez still seethes over her removal from the case. “Why did they do it?” she asks rhetorically. “So I would stop the investigations that were poisoning the life of Sarkozy and Courroye, so that, finally, there would be no more Bettencourt Affair.”
Courroye and Kiejman had finally succeeded in ejecting Prévost-Desprez from the case, but Courroye himself was disgraced and humiliated in the process. Not only were his own investigations snatched out of his hands; his very career was compromised and ultimately derailed: On August 3, 2012, Courroye would be demoted and sent to Paris, not as chief prosecutor, as he had always hoped, but as a subaltern in the Prosecutor’s Office. Prévost-Desprez, for her part, was later cleared of the charges against her and promoted in August 2016 to the post of first deputy vice president of the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris, where she currently oversees antiterrorism cases.
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The transfer of the case to Bordeaux spurred Pascal Wilhelm and Didier Martin, attorneys respectively for Liliane and Françoise, to accelerate their pursuit of a mother-daughter accord. The talks had hit a speed bump in October when Françoise suddenly filed a new petition to put her mother under guardianship. Wilhelm retaliated with a complaint against Françoise for “psychological violence” against his client. The exchange was hardly conducive to reconciliation, but Wilhelm’s message was clear: “You want war, you’ll get war.” Liliane “was in combat mode at that point,” he explains. “It was out of the question for her to be put under guardianship.”
But the change of jurisdiction, with a brand-new team of investigators and judges, disrupted the strategies of both parties. Moreover, the litigation had just been made more complex by a second citation filed by Olivier Metzner on November 3, this one accusing de Maistre and Liliane’s tax lawyer, Fabrice Goguel, as well as Banier, of abuse of weakness. The parties were now looking at a much longer procedure, with the possibility that Liliane Bettencourt, who had just turned eighty-eight, might die before it was resolved in court. Under these circumstances, both sides came under pressure from L’Oréal management to end the conflict that they feared might damage the brand.
In mid-November, Didier Martin informed Wilhelm that his client was ready to move ahead quickly. But both sides would have to make concessions. The Meyerses (for Jean-Pierre was totally involved in the process) had to give up on the idea of imposing a guardianship on Liliane and recovering all the liberalities given to Banier; Liliane had to sacrifice Patrice de Maistre—Françoise demanded his ouster—cut off ties with Banier, and grant the Meyerses an important role in L’Oréal’s management, along with a substantial transfer of capital into their hands.
“Your daughter is like Prince Charles,” Wilhelm explained to the heiress. “She could die before you, without ever having the attributes of power. So you have to rectify that by giving her access to your fortune before your death, and access to power within L’Oréal. That’s the basis of the deal. We’re going to negotiate your freedom against power and money.” Liliane’s two main concerns at that point, says Wilhelm, were “family coexistence and keeping L’Oréal in the family.”
Liliane took no direct part in the talks. On December 1, 2010, she mandated Wilhelm to negotiate on her behalf. His interlocutors were not the Meyerses, whom he saw only four times during the process, but Didier Martin and Olivier Metzner, who had been brought into the talks in late November. It was Metzner’s task to negotiate separate settlements with Banier, de Maistre, and Goguel.
On Monday, December 6, 2010, mother and daughter signed their agreement, each in her own home. That evening, the whole family gathered in the Bettencourt mansion to celebrate over champagne. Though Françoise reported that her mother was “very happy about the reconciliation,” one can wonder how much the old woman actually understood about the terms. Indeed, Dr. Christophe de Jaeger, who examined Madame Bettencourt on December 17 at her daughter’s request, judged that the heiress was “not apt to perform legal acts” or “manage her affairs” because her “cognitive faculties . . . were clearly altered by a cerebral malady of mixed origin.”
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The eight-page protocol contained a preamble, followed by ten articles and five annexes. The main points:
Like de Maistre and Goguel, Banier signed a separate agreement with Françoise Meyers. But there wasn’t much room to negotiate, say his lawyers. The central points were take it or leave it: Banier gives up the two insurance policies on which he was the designated beneficiary; Banier and d’Orgeval can keep all the other gifts they received from Liliane up to the date of the protocol but can accept no more; both parties withdraw their reciprocal suits and all related legal actions.
In the interest of ending the conflict and avoiding a trial, Banier agreed to sign. But he first wanted a guarantee that his surrender of the insurance contracts was at Liliane’s request. Once reassured on that point—Liliane’s explicit demand was inserted into the text—Banier gave his OK. He was giving up more than €600 million on paper, but in fact he had little choice: Liliane, or her agents, could have cashed in the contracts at any time, effectively nullifying Banier’s status as beneficiary.
On the afternoon of December 6, Nicolas Huc-Morel, Metzner’s associate, hand-delivered the final text to the Left Bank office of Banier’s lawyer Laurent Merlet. Sitting at a white marble conference table, Banier gave the seven-page protocol a cursory read, then signed with a black felt pen. Martin d’Orgeval took photos to mark what they all thought was the end of their ordeal. To celebrate, Banier, d’Orgeval, and Merlet went out that evening to take in a performance of My Fair Lady at the Théâtre du Châtelet. But their minds were not focused on Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. “We talked more about Liliane than about the musical comedy,” Merlet recalls. “Banier kept saying, ‘Liliane did that to have peace.’”
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L’Oréal’s PR firm, delighted over the apparent end to the conflict, issued a press release celebrating the return of “family harmony” and “serenity.” But as the terms of the supposedly confidential agreements became known, some observers questioned the lopsided nature of a deal deemed far more advantageous to the daughter than to her mother. Attention focused, in particular, on the €12 million that Françoise exacted from Liliane to pay her own lawyers for their services since 2007. This was not actually included in the text of the December 6 protocol, but was stipulated in a separate letter. As Wilhelm tells it, the demand had come from the Meyers side and caught him totally by surprise.
“Didier Martin called me one evening and said we had not yet talked about honorariums for the legal teams. I said each side pays their own fees. He says, ‘No. Madame Meyers wants Madame Bettencourt to pay her fees.’ I said, ‘I’ll ask her, but that’s not what we agreed on. How much are we talking about?’ He says, ‘Twelve million.’” Wilhelm recounts that when he put the question to Liliane, “she laughed out loud.” But in the end she paid.
One jurist who bitterly criticized the deal was Georges Kiejman, who had represented Madame Bettencourt since July 2009 but was left out of the negotiations. “I was in a rage, an absolute rage,” he told me, denouncing this “scandalous” protocol that ran “completely counter to Liliane’s deepest wishes. The people who rule over her life today are the very ones she detested before.” Kiejman was especially miffed over the €12 million paid mostly to his bête-noire, Metzner—ten times more than he himself billed Liliane over the eighteen months that he worked for her. But his sharpest criticism of the accord was that Françoise and her lawyers had been shouting from the rooftops since 2007 that Liliane had lost her reason, so “how could she sign this protocol in 2010?”
“It’s incomprehensible,” says Richard Malka, lawyer for Banier’s partner, Martin d’Orgeval. “Liliane Bettencourt gave up everything to her daughter and son-in-law. When she gives to her daughter, that’s OK. When she gives to others, it’s an abuse of weakness.” This line of argument was hardly limited to the pro-Banier camp. Sarkozy aide Patrick Ouart privately questions the validity of accepting the signature of “an elderly lady” who had supposedly “lost her discernment.”
One of the harshest criticisms of the deal comes from the man who helped negotiate it: Pascal Wilhelm. “I think those people [the Meyerses], from beginning to end, did not seek family reconciliation, they wanted money and power,” he says. “If they thought Madame Bettencourt wasn’t lucid, they shouldn’t have asked for the 12 million. If they say she was in a state of weakness, then that was an abuse of weakness.”
Wilhelm’s objectivity may be subject to caution, not only because he negotiated the deal for Liliane but also because Françoise Meyers later took him to court. But the question remains valid: How could the Meyerses maintain that Madame Bettencourt was mentally incompetent and at the same time accept her signature on a document that gave them substantial advantages?
When a lawyer for Wilhelm later put that question to Jean-Pierre Meyers, his answer was as contemptuous as it was laconic: “No comment. That’s the only answer I will give to your question.” Françoise herself always hid behind the lawyers when asked about the circumstances surrounding the accord, denying that she had played any direct role in the negotiations or made any demands “concerning the financial conditions.”
Nicolas Huc-Morel, one of her lawyers, defends the validity of the accord on the grounds that Liliane had legally mandated Wilhelm to negotiate on her behalf. “The family never considered that she was in a state to sign such a protocol—that is, in a state of perfect consciousness,” he told me. “That’s the reason she had a lawyer and that the discussions were carried out exclusively with this lawyer, who was charged with defending her interests.” Liliane’s interests were effectively served, says Huc-Morel, by restoring the “family peace,” expelling “all the predators,” and allowing her to “recover the life-insurance contracts.” Concerning the last point, it is worth noting that one of those two contracts was signed over to Françoise (who partially cashed it for €93,900,000) and the other to Françoise’s two sons, so the direct financial benefit to Liliane was zero.
Nor were all the so-called predators banished. If the agreements of December 2010 indeed removed Banier and de Maistre from Liliane’s entourage, they enabled a new operator to take charge of the heiress’s affairs: Pascal Wilhelm. In addition to his status as Liliane’s legal representative and future protector, the lawyer replaced de Maistre as her money manager and became her testamentary executor on December 16, 2010. In those multiple roles, Wilhelm managed to oversee her spending and investments, her choice of personnel, her dealings with L’Oréal, and even modifications of her will. Starting January 2011, he says, “I assumed most of these tasks on my own . . . No expenditure was made outside my control.”
Wilhelm argues that all those actions came under his responsibility as Liliane’s future protector—where the “future” began was not entirely clear—a service for which his firm billed €200,000 per month. The problem was that he managed her business in a way that was often beneficial to him and raised questions about conflicts of interest. After convincing Liliane to designate her two grandsons as her legal heirs, for example, he attempted to block their access to their share of the family fortune and the insurance contracts until their fortieth birthdays (they were then twenty-two and twenty-four, respectively). During that long interval, Wilhelm was to manage the capital and receive regular fees for that service. When he was later questioned about this in court, Wilhelm claimed it was Liliane herself who insisted on this time frame—but nothing confirmed this in writing.
The biggest apparent conflict of interest concerned Wilhelm’s intervention on behalf of businessman Stéphane Courbit, a pioneer in French reality TV. A client of Wilhelm’s—and a personal friend of President Sarkozy—Courbit was then looking for investors in his online betting company. When several potential partners begged off, Wilhelm arranged for Liliane Bettencourt to invest nearly €150 million in a scheme about which she apparently understood nothing. (After her brief meeting with the boyish-looking and perpetually tanned Courbit, she mistook him for a pop singer and asked Wilhelm to send her a tape of his latest recordings.) The initial agreement with Courbit was signed on December 17, 2010—the very same day that Dr. de Jaeger examined the heiress and judged her incapable of performing legal acts.
Wilhelm and Courbit later faced legal action for making this deal with a clearly vulnerable party. But the irony is that Liliane actually made money on it—€15 million by the time Courbit paid back her original investment. “I was blamed for making the deal with a client of mine,” says Wilhelm. “But financially it was a good investment.” And incidentally, not a bad deal for Wilhelm, who billed Courbit’s company €150,000 for his services.
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In imposing his control over Liliane’s affairs, Wilhelm found a valuable ally in Alain Thurin, who had served as her personal nurse since 2009 and was her most trusted employee. Thurin acted as a conduit between the lawyer and the heiress and, according to his accusers, attempted to isolate her from her family and other employees. In effect, Thurin rode herd on the heiress’s personal life, while Wilhelm managed her business interests.
Communicating via email, Wilhelm would send Thurin the texts of letters that Thurin would then print out and dictate to Madame Bettencourt. The heiress would dutifully copy the documents on her personal stationery and sign them in her own hand. (This resembled a pattern whereby, according to Banier’s accusers, the photographer would purloin her letterhead stationery and dictate self-serving letters to her—a practice that he denied, and was never proven, though the suspicions remained.)
Thurin, who actually slept in Liliane’s bedroom, developed such a close relationship with his employer that he would speak to her in the familiar tu form—not even Banier dared do that. “Alain Thurin’s role went beyond that of a simple nurse,” said Wilhelm. “Madame Bettencourt insisted on his presence around her.” Thurin’s attentions did not go unrewarded: In August 2011, allegedly at Wilhelm’s urging, Madame Bettencourt revised her will to include a €10 million gift to her nurse. (Thurin later claimed that he only learned of the legacy via the press and immediately asked the heiress to rescind it.)
Looking on all of this in horror, Françoise Meyers began to wonder if she hadn’t exchanged one set of parasites for another. The December 6 protocol, which was supposed to bring the family back together and protect her mother, had accomplished neither goal—despite its material concessions to the Meyerses. One way or another, she knew she had to banish the new interlopers and establish full control over her mother. But for the moment, her hands were tied by the agreements she had signed.
Then a strange thing happened. The three Bordeaux judges to whom the Bettencourt cases had been assigned kept working in spite of the peace pact, and in spite of the local prosecutor’s call to end the investigations. How could that be? Under French law, the withdrawal of complaints by opposing parties does not necessarily end a procedure if the magistrates suspect that infractions may have been committed. In this instance, the Bordeaux-based investigating judges decided to carry on. The Bettencourt Affair was far from over.
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For Georges Kiejman, though, it was over. Furious about the protocol, he quarreled with Wilhelm—“one of the moths who circled around the flame”—and was severed from Liliane’s legal team. “They made her fire me in order to have a free hand,” he says with some bitterness. The professional tie with Liliane was broken, but the friendship remained. In January 2011, shortly after Kiejman ceased to represent her, Liliane invited him to lunch in Neuilly. It was on that occasion that he realized, sadly, that her mind was indeed slipping. “At one point, she looked at me and said, ‘You must be nice to your father,’” Kiejman recalls. “I replied, ‘But Liliane, I told you my father was assassinated at Auschwitz.’”