Île de Boëdic, Sunday, March 17, 2013. Even on weekends, Olivier Metzner was an early riser. He usually lit the first of his half dozen daily cigars at seven a.m., while perusing the latest news on his computer. On this particular morning, though, he was not at his desk. In fact, the guardian of Metzner’s private island off the coast of Brittany could not find him anywhere, and one of his two boats was missing. On the dining-room table, she found a list of his law partners with their mobile phone numbers and instructions to contact them. She called the first name on the list: Emmanuel Marsigny. “Don’t touch anything, and call the gendarmes,” Marsigny instructed. Moments later, the guardian’s husband spotted the boat drifting in the Gulf of Morbihan with no one aboard. Metzner’s body was later found near the shore.
Within hours the Agence France-Presse wire service broadcast the stunning news that Olivier Metzner was dead at age sixty-three, an apparent suicide victim.
No one had suspected that France’s leading criminal lawyer contemplated such a dramatic end to his career—least of all the four associates in his law office. Metzner had left a detailed note naming Nicolas Huc-Morel as his successor at the head of the firm and exhorting his colleagues to “preserve the defense of our clients.”
Prominent among those clients, of course, was Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, whose suit against Banier had become Metzner’s most famous case. According to Huc-Morel, the Bettencourt Affair was also supposed to be “the last case that he would plead. He wanted to end his professional career with this case.” Huc-Morel, who worked closely with Metzner for twelve years, believes that he “perhaps felt he was starting to decline” and that his “passion” for the law was waning.
Metzner’s real passion was the sea. That’s why he had purchased this seventeen-acre private island three years earlier—a Y-shaped expanse of emerald grass and trees surrounded by sand beaches and rocky outcroppings. Metzner spent eleven months and a small fortune restoring its structures: a stone chapel, a three-story main house, and a sizeable outbuilding. A fervent opera lover, he had converted the chapel into a concert hall with a grand piano in place of the altar. Speakers hidden discreetly around the property dispensed classical music nonstop. Under Metzner’s personal direction, the opulent interiors were fitted out with designer furniture and modern paintings. The spaces seem conceived for convivial entertaining—an immense state-of-the art kitchen with a rosewood dinner table and ten matching chairs; a clubby living room featuring an open fireplace, cozy leather armchairs, and a mahogany bar with blue backlighting; a billiard room with a rack full of pool cues.
The only thing missing was people. Metzner was a profoundly lonely soul, a homosexual with no fixed partner, few real friends, and no family apart from an estranged brother and sister. Probably his closest relationships were his professional ties to the four partners in his firm—all young, brilliant, and strikingly handsome.
An obsessive workaholic, he would spend long hours in his gilded office near the National Assembly, then carry a computer full of scanned documents back to his Paris apartment and keep working. On weekends, he would take the high-speed TVG train to Brittany and retreat to his island, usually alone. His capacity for hard work and his brilliance as a procedural strategist had catapulted him to the top of his field as a criminal lawyer, despite his limited skills as an orator. But his sharp elbows and outsize ego won him few friends in the profession.
For all his success, Metzner was not a happy man. French journalist Denis Robert recounts a moving scene that took place in 1997, while he was filming a TV interview in Metzner’s Left Bank office on the rue de l’Université. They were discussing his past cases when the lawyer suddenly fell silent. “He started crying like a baby,” Robert recalls. “He explained that he had ruined his life. His real happiness would have been to be a sailor and go to sea. The work of a lawyer ground him down.”
Be a sailor and go to sea. That’s what he had in mind when he bought his 45-meter motor-powered yacht several weeks before his suicide. He had also put the Île de Boëdic up for sale for a reported €10 million. Asked by a journalist why he wanted to give up his beloved island after working so hard to restore it, he replied, perhaps prophetically, “I have another project; I am going to discover the sea more and more.”
“Just a week before this happened, he sent me a text message inviting me to join him on vacation with my children and tour the Greek islands on his boat,” says Nicolas Huc-Morel, who now regrets that he didn’t take Metzner up on the offer. “He had been in love with the sea ever since he was a kid. When he bought this island, and then the boat, it was a way for him to realize a dream.” Huc-Morel, forty-one, a stylish dresser who sports a neatly manicured beard, can only speculate on what happened during Metzner’s solo cruise on the Mediterranean. “I think things didn’t go as he had hoped, and so he decided to return to his island and do what he did.”
What does all this have to do with the Bettencourt Affair? Everything.
Because Olivier Metzner created the Bettencourt Affair. It was Metzner who wrote the complaint that triggered the initial investigation. It was Metzner who decided to change horses and take his case directly to Judge Prévost-Desprez’s court when Courroye was about to bury it. And it was Metzner who, with a Machiavellian brilliance, leaked the butler’s recordings to the press and turned his flagging case into a headline-grabbing national scandal.
But if Metzner is the man who “made” the Bettencourt Affair, perhaps it was the affair that unmade him. Every suicide has complex motivations, and Olivier Metzner’s lonely private life suggests reasons for his act. But to some observers, the heady vapors of the Bettencourt case must have contributed to his fatal decision. “I think he was drunk on his own success,” says his friend and colleague Hervé Temime, who for a time represented Banier. “Since he was a complex personality, and probably not at all as self-satisfied as he appeared, I think he blew a fuse.” Isabelle Prévost-Desprez also believes that the Bettencourt Affair was “not unrelated to Metzner’s suicide. I think all these people lost their heads in the face of all the money, all the power, all the political pressures.”
Metzner was not the only one who lost his head. On April 2, 2013, less than a month after Metzner’s suicide, Commissaire Noël Robin was found dead in an unmarked police car, his brains blown out by his own service revolver. As deputy director of the Paris-based Financial Brigade, Robin, fifty-five, had supervised the Bettencourt investigations under both Prévost-Desprez and Courroye.
Prévost-Desprez says Robin was caught in the tug-of-war between the two rival magistrates. His apparent suicide was attributed to “personal” reasons, but who can say that the stress of the high-profile Bettencourt case did not add a dose of anxiety and despair?
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On January 25, 2015, an early-morning stroller spotted a man dangling from a tree in a forest near the town of Brétigny-sur-Orge, south of Paris. Emergency workers cut him down and rushed him to the hospital hovering between life and death. It was Alain Thurin, sixty-five, Liliane Bettencourt’s trusted nurse, who was scheduled to go on trial the next day for abusing the weakness of his former employer. One of ten defendants in the case, along with Banier, d’Orgeval, and de Maistre, Thurin had been overwhelmed by the affair and had not even engaged a lawyer to represent him. He had been extremely close to the heiress—he would write “je t’aime” on his notes to her—and she reciprocated by bequeathing him a €10 million legacy in her will (since rescinded). Married, with a daughter and an autistic son, Thurin had prepared his act in advance, as he explained in a poignant letter to the Bordeaux prosecutor.
“I adored working with Madame, it was a great honor, she is a remarkable woman,” he wrote. “I am not in a position to manage my own defense, because if I verbally attack M. Banier or others, it will be my word against theirs, and being confronted by all these eminent lawyers would be very difficult, especially without proofs.” He added: “My wife does not know about my decision, and it is for that reason that I must push back the hour. To be awakened in the middle of the night would not be a good thing, especially when she and my son will be sleeping. I know it will be difficult at first, but I know she will get over my absence.” Thurin remained in a deep coma for weeks. He finally recovered and was acquitted in a separate trial in October 2015.
The Bettencourt Affair, it seems, was no mere struggle over jealousy, money, and power. For some, it was a matter of life and death.