Bordeaux, Monday, January 26, 2015. Shortly before ten a.m., two black vans with tinted windows pull up in front of the gold-tipped gates of the Palais de justice. Françoise Meyers and her two sons emerge, accompanied by two bodyguards with curlicue wires jammed in their ears, four lawyers, and two representatives of the PR firm that handles the family’s press relations. Françoise, as usual, is dressed in a black pantsuit with a multicolored scarf. Staring straight ahead through her thick-framed glasses, she ignores the outstretched microphones and clicking cameras that surround her. She is protectively flanked by Jean-Victor and Nicolas Meyers, both wearing black suits and somber expressions more befitting a funeral than a court of law where their mother hopes, after eight years, to see justice done to the man she claims expropriated her mother and ripped her family apart.
Minutes later, François-Marie Banier arrives on foot, accompanied by Martin d’Orgeval and their three lawyers. Banier wears a slight smile on his thin lips, as if he were an amused spectator of this drama and not its central figure. Martin does not smile; his jaw is tightly clenched. Their fellow defendants—Liliane’s former adviser Patrice de Maistre, her ex-lawyer Pascal Wilhelm, businessman Stéphane Courbit, and the notaries Patrice Bonduelle and Jean-Michel Normand—all enter the courtroom and take their place on the front benches to the right of the central aisle. Carlos Vejarano, manager of the Île d’Arros, accused of cajoling €2 million out of the heiress, is too ill to attend, as is nurse Alain Thurin, still in a deep coma after attempting suicide the day before. The last to arrive is Éric Woerth, Sarkozy’s former cabinet minister and campaign treasurer. Looking strangely cheerful, Woerth goes out of his way to shake the hand of Patrice de Maistre, the man with whom he allegedly colluded over campaign cash, a prestigious medal, and a plum job for Woerth’s wife.
On the plaintiffs’ benches to the left of the aisle sits Olivier Pelat, Liliane Bettencourt’s guardian for legal matters. Standing well over six feet, with broad shoulders, a jutting chin, and an intimidating gaze, he could be a retired rugby player, though the elegant cut of his suit and the mirror shine on his black shoes bespeak the prosperous real estate promoter that he is. Placid and stone-faced, he reveals no hint of emotion—apart perhaps from his compulsive nail-biting.
In October 2011, Pelat had filed on Liliane’s behalf as a plaintiff in the action against Banier and the other defendants. That was a total turnaround from her position in 2009, when her lawyer, Georges Kiejman, registered her as a plaintiff against her daughter’s suit. At that time, Liliane’s objective was to affirm that she was not a victim of abuse and to oppose the action targeting Banier. Now, unable to voice her own wishes, she found herself on the opposite side of the dispute. Not that she knew the difference at that point. As Pelat told the court, the heiress, then ninety-two, had passed “into another world,” her words “absolutely unrealistic” and her mind somewhere “out west.”
The other plaintiffs against Banier were Liliane’s grandsons, Jean-Victor, twenty-nine, and Nicolas, twenty-seven. As noted, Françoise had been obliged to drop charges against Banier and de Maistre as a condition of the December 2010 protocols. She got around that by having her sons file complaints in her place. Françoise herself was a plaintiff against the other defendants. Prominent among them was Pascal Wilhelm, the lawyer who had negotiated the 2010 accord—a deal that was highly favorable to the Meyerses—but who was now accused of abusing Liliane Bettencourt in his role as her protector. Jean-Pierre Meyers, though totally supportive of his wife’s action, was not a plaintiff and did not attend the trial.
The prosecution’s main target was Banier himself, who faced the prospect of three years in prison, plus substantial fines and damages. The photographer was specifically accused of abusing the weakness of Liliane Bettencourt by obtaining more than €442 million worth of gifts between September 1, 2006, and October 29, 2009, the period covered by the trial. The bulk of that sum was in the form of insurance contracts that he had returned in December 2010, but some €173 million remained in his possession. The gifts he received prior to September 2006, when the heiress was considered lucid, were not in question. And though Banier’s status as Liliane’s légataire universel had since been revoked, he also had to answer for the circumstances that led to that designation, potentially worth more than €1 billion to him had the heiress died while it was still in force.
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At precisely ten a.m. a bell rings and all rise as presiding judge Denis Roucou enters the courtroom through a rear door, accompanied by his associates Anne-Marie Vollette and Sylvia Pons. Arrayed before the judges’ bench are the thirty-five red-bound volumes of investigative files transmitted by Judge Jean-Michel Gentil. Gentil and his associates are no longer involved in the case: In the French legal system, once the investigating magistrates send a case to court, a trio of trial judges takes charge. It is the presiding judge, in this case Roucou, who plays the lead role in interrogating defendants and witnesses. Lawyers for the various parties can make observations and question witnesses, but the presiding judge remains firmly in control. Unlike the adversarial system used in the United States and Britain, where advocates for opposing parties argue their cases before impartial judges or juries, the French practice, based on the Napoleonic Code, is an inquisitorial system in which the judges themselves pursue the truth and pronounce the verdict.
Roucou, then age fifty-five, was known as a tough, sometimes combative judge. In his previous career in the Assize tribunals—the courts that deal with violent crimes—Roucou had presided over two of France’s most notorious cases: the 2009 death of an eight-year-old girl after years of brutal torture by her parents; and the rape/murder of a thirteen-year-old by her twenty-four-year-old neighbor. Roucou pulled no punches in those cases: All three defendants received thirty-year sentences. (Incompressible life terms are rare in France, and the death penalty was abolished in 1981.) François-Marie Banier was no murderer, but he and his legal team could expect no leniency from this battle-hardened jurist whose hostility to the photographer seemed evident from the beginning of the four-week trial. With his salt-and-pepper goatee and wire-rimmed glasses, Roucou regarded the defendant with the air of a disapproving schoolmaster—and Banier had never gotten along with his schoolmasters. “It is clear that Roucou cannot abide him and scarcely tries to hide the fact,” observed a reporter for Le Monde.
Standing alone at the bar, arms folded behind his back, Banier was alternately charming, droll, flippant, and exasperated under his first six hours of questioning by Roucou. Asked to describe his background, he portrayed himself as a battered child from a modest family. “I didn’t lead the life of some little marquis.” Roucou interjected that he lived on the avenue Victor-Hugo, one of Paris’s most fashionable streets. “Yes, but it was a tiny apartment,” Banier retorted. He evoked his youthful “panache” and recited the now-familiar litany of his early triumphs as a writer, his appearance on the cover of the Sunday Times, his friendships with famous people, his naming of the “world’s two best-selling perfumes.” Rejecting the notion that he was some frivolous dandy or gigolo, he insisted that he had “always worked, morning till night” and had plenty of money before he met Liliane Bettencourt.
At times, Roucou and Banier appeared to be engaged in a sparring match. The judge asked why he had stashed away so many paintings in bank vaults. “That’s a very French question,” Banier retorted. “I’m not going to hang them one on top of one another. I’m not that kind of poseur.” And why did Banier refer to Pierre Bergé, the lifelong partner of Yves St. Laurent, as the “dwarf Bergé” in his notebooks? “Why not?” Banier shot back. “Where is my freedom? People call Sarkozy a dwarf and that doesn’t bother him.” Roucou’s response—“Sarkozy is no longer part of this case”—touched off peals of laughter from the packed courtroom.
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Banier’s mockery seemed somewhat ungracious, since Bergé had provided a letter on his behalf. It was one of a dozen attestations from his supporters—including former supermodel Inès de la Fressange and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg—extolling Banier’s generosity, charm, and creativity. Two character witnesses appeared in person. The rotund actor and theater director Jean-Michel Ribes, sporting a purple fedora with a pink headband, called Banier “sharp, intelligent, droll”—nothing like “this predator image that people try to stick on him.” But wouldn’t you say he is “seductive”? prompted the prosecutor. “Why don’t you summon the pope to your courtroom?” Ribes replied with a mocking smile. “The pope has charm, he is seductive. If seduction and charm are condemnable, then a lot of people should go to jail.” More titters from the public benches.
Corinne Paradis, mother of singer/actress Vanessa Paradis, described Banier as an attentive godfather to Lily-Rose, the daughter of Vanessa and Johnny Depp. Had she ever seen Banier act violently? Only once, said Paradis, “when I lit a cigarette, he ripped it out of my mouth and crushed it.” (Banier, adamantly anti-tobacco, makes a habit of doing this—even to total strangers in the street.)
Roucou was visibly unimpressed with the pro-Banier contingent, and refused to allow Corinne Paradis to read her daughter’s letter in court. Nor did he give much attention to the investigative depositions that were favorable to the photographer. On the contrary, Banier was confronted with an array of hostile witnesses who either appeared at the bar or had their depositions read out loud by Judge Roucou. Collectively, they reinforced the image of Liliane as physically and mentally impaired and depicted Banier as a cynical manipulator.
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Liliane’s close friend Monique de Libouton, an eighty-two-year-old L’Oréal retiree, was unable to attend, but Roucou read portions of her 2010 deposition. “François-Marie Banier used violent language with Liliane, and called her ma grosse [fatty]. I saw him in front of me grab Liliane brusquely and the surprising reaction of my friend was to cluck like a hen. . . . I think François-Marie Banier has become a kind of guru to her. . . . [He] mixes cajolery and meanness and knows no limits.” Banier sputtered with outrage: “It’s slanderous! It’s an absolute lie! It’s a vile, ignoble testimony. . . . I was never violent with Madame Bettencourt.”
Former chambermaid Dominique Gaspard repeated the claims she had made in her original 2007 attestation and subsequent interrogations: Banier ripped the lipstick out of Liliane’s hands, asked her repeatedly about her checkbook, chose her clothes, told her which doctors to consult. And of course Gaspard recounted the now-famous story about overhearing Banier and Liliane discussing a plan for “simple adoption.”
Roucou asked Banier what this adoption project was all about.
“It never existed,” Banier scoffed. “Madame Bettencourt would never have had such an idea and me neither. We didn’t have that kind of relationship . . . It’s a joke.” He dismissed Gaspard’s claim as another of “the lies infiltrated into the procedure by all these false witnesses.”
But lawyers for the Meyers side insisted the adoption story was not so easy to dismiss. How could a chambermaid invent a term like “adoption simple,” which has a precise legal meaning? (In an adoption simple, which can apply to adults as well as minors, the adoptee has all the rights of a biological child and heir without taking the name of the adopter.) Jean-Pierre Ferrandes, Banier’s former notary, admitted that he might have mentioned adoption briefly while giving him an overview of succession issues but said it was never seriously discussed. “François-Marie Banier was not adopted,” said Nicolas Huc-Morel, attorney for Françoise Meyers and her sons, “but we must admit that he came pretty close to it.” Banier’s defense team called the idea unthinkable. “In France,” said Laurent Merlet, “adoption requires the accord of the family and has to go before a judge. That was impossible in this case. What professional of the law would propose such a thing?”
Other Bettencourt employees, including secretaries Christine Djenane and Claire Trovel stepped up to the bar and delivered damning accounts of Banier’s behavior and Liliane’s mental confusion. Banier rejected their claims as rumor-mongering by jealous underlings. “These are people seeking revenge for a life they’ve never had,” he sneered. “You have only to read Les bonnes [The maids] by Jean Genet.”
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Banier’s most determined accuser was the person who had launched the suit against him in the first place: Françoise Bettencourt Meyers. Questioned as a witness, she repeated the charges she had previously aired in her public interviews and multiple depositions before the magistrates. She and her parents formed a happy and united family until Banier came along. Little by little he imposed his influence on her mother, put her under a “spell,” and sought to destroy the family in order to get his hands on Liliane’s fortune. “Monsieur Banier’s technique was divide and conquer,” she said. “As an only child, I had to rescue my mother from this hornet’s nest.” Under questioning, she admitted soliciting the attestations that accompanied her original complaint, but insisted that she had never “bought the testimony” of any witness.
Banier did not attack Françoise head-on, but managed to insert a few barbs over the course of the trial. “Madame Bettencourt was frightened to death at the idea of winding up in the hands of her daughter and son-in-law,” he said. “It’s been like that ever since their marriage.” Asked why he tried to persuade Madame Bettencourt that her daughter’s suit was against her, Banier again took aim at Françoise, his words dripping with irony and venom: “I think that a daughter who loves her mother so tenderly, so deeply, would have talked to her before launching this suit if it was not against her,” he said. “What counts in my eyes is not what’s going to happen to me, but the fact that Liliane Bettencourt has been portrayed as some laughable, grotesque personage. Of course it’s a suit against Liliane Bettencourt.”
Françoise could hardly have been pleased to hear Banier expound upon his intimate relationship with her mother. “She was a woman who wanted to share things with me,” he said. “She gave me the possibility of doing things I could never have done without her. And with me she experienced things that she would certainly not have known. . . . There was a language I created with her that was expressed through this money that she wanted to give me.”
Over and over he made this point: Money was merely the means of expressing the depth of their relationship, not the reason for it. “It gave her pleasure to give me money,” he told the court. “It was a great joy for her. She said herself that I never asked for anything. There is no manipulation. There is no abuse of weakness . . . It was a game for her. She lit a fire, but she is no longer here to put it out.”
And what did he do with all those millions? Roucou asked.
Banier said he spent it on improving his properties, on artworks, on collecting rare books and manuscripts—Proust, Rimbaud, Flaubert—“things I could never have had without Liliane.” Aesthetic and intellectual pursuits, not the ostentatious acquisitions of the nouveau riche. “I didn’t buy a house in St. Tropez, or an airplane, or a Rolls. I won’t exchange my motor scooter for a Ferrari.” Still, that was a long way from Liliane’s initial claim that she was helping launch Banier’s career as an artist.
Didn’t he ever think of refusing her gifts?
Impossible, said Banier. “When I refuse, it’s like denying Liliane Bettencourt her pleasure and her desire.” He insisted that it was Liliane who took the lead in their relationship, Liliane who decided. “Which one of us had control over the other? Which one is the victim of the other?”
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The prosecutor and the lawyers for the Meyers side did not buy the notion that Liliane decided of her own free will to cover Banier with gold. Leaning on the reports of medical experts and the testimony of numerous witnesses from the heiress’s entourage, they maintained that her declining mental state left her open to manipulation by her protégé. In particular, Banier’s accusers pointed to a disturbing pattern by which the liberalities spiked at periods of Liliane’s greatest weakness. It was in the wake of the Formentor accident in 2006, for example, that Liliane, still groggy and overmedicated by many accounts, officially designated Banier as the beneficiary of a life-insurance contract worth €262 million at the time. It was shortly after André’s death that the distraught and grieving heiress named Banier her légataire universel in December 2007. And it was during that same period that the maid Dominique Gaspard claimed to have overheard talk of an adoption project.
Banier angrily denied any such pattern, just as he denied that Liliane’s powers of decision-making were altered by her age and physical decline. “You know very well that Madame Bettencourt had full control of her mind, she was not this laughable character we are presented with,” he said. “Do you think the people at L’Oréal kept a nutcase around since 2003?” he said. The insurance designation, he accurately noted, was merely the confirmation of something she had already granted him by testament in 1997, at a time when no one questioned her mental capacities. As for his légataire universel status, Banier claimed not to have understood what it meant, even though he himself had organized and hosted the meeting at which his lawyer and notary discussed that option. To his mind, the meeting was about ways to secure Liliane’s gifts against future challenges by her daughter and son-in-law. “She told me five or six days later that she had made me her légataire universel. I was very upset,” he told the court. “I had already had enough money in my life, I didn’t need to deal with that.”
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In contrast to Banier’s stormy performance, Martin d’Orgeval was calm and composed at the bar. Like Banier, he was accused of abusing the weakness of the aged heiress, but his gains seemed almost modest compared to Banier’s: two paintings by Jean Arp and Max Ernst as reversionary property (total value €1,699,931, including gift taxes); a check for €564,853 to pay for three photographs by Eugène Cuvelier purchased at auction by d’Orgeval and Banier; and the outright gift of three Cuvelier prints (€909,164, including tax). Beyond that, he was seen to share in a lavish lifestyle, financed largely by Liliane’s gifts to Banier, that was marked by expenditures averaging as much as €25,000 a day, according to the Meyerses’ lawyers.
The amounts in question were substantial, but Martin appeared to have wandered into this windfall almost blindly, following the lead of his older partner. Indeed, some critics called him, uncharitably, Banier’s toutou—or lap dog. His responses to the charges were a mixture of frankness, naïveté, and denial. He was surprised and touched by the gifts, which were thoughtfully “chosen” by Liliane as a sign of friendship and support. As a specialist on Jean Arp, the subject of his art history thesis, and as an admirer of Cuvelier, an inspiration for his own photography, Martin said he was pleased by these acquisitions for reasons that had nothing to do with their monetary value. “I never saw Liliane for her money,” he protested. “I never expected or demanded anything from her. Whenever she was described as a billionaire, it burned my ears. I protested before I accepted [her gifts].”
Questioned about his role as Liliane’s subsidiary légataire universel—her backup heir if Banier died first—d’Orgeval claimed that he was unaware of his designation until he learned of it from the press. “I knew nothing about the conditions,” he said, “and it was absolutely not legitimate.” Like Banier, he said he was glad when that testament was annulled in 2010. On this and other points, Martin’s claim of innocence and ignorance met with skepticism from the court and the plaintiffs’ lawyers. But his words at the witness stand mostly gave the impression of a polite young man who had blithely accepted his good fortune without troubling too much about the details. “I knew Liliane was helping François-Marie,” he said, “but I didn’t get involved in the accounting.”
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Claire Thibout, whose whistle-blowing had triggered the whole affair, testified from Paris via an audiovisual hookup. Under psychiatric treatment and medication for nervous depression, she had obtained a doctor’s certificate to avoid the stress of appearing in person. She seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, her voice rising at times to a shrill pitch. Her anxiety was understandable: Not only was she a key witness against Banier and de Maistre, she herself was under investigation by a Paris magistrate for false testimony. The obvious aim of the defense teams was to throw Thibout off balance and discredit her claims.
Almost from the beginning of her five-hour screen appearance, Thibout was grilled by Roucou and defense lawyers about her financial relations with Françoise Meyers—the €400,000 “severance” payment and the €300,000 loan. “I never negotiated for my testimony,” Thibout insisted. “My lawyer negotiated an indemnity in case I was fired.” Her claim contradicted earlier testimony by Eve du Breuil, de Maistre’s former secretary, who called Thibout “bipolar” and said the accountant had told her “that the employees of Madame Bettencourt crossed the street to see Françoise Meyers and recount what happened in her mother’s house in exchange for cash.” (Thibout denied ever discussing the subject with du Breuil and called her story “nonsense.”)
Thibout was also pressed to explain why in 2006 she sent Madame Bettencourt’s notary the deeds to two apartments with a letter claiming the heiress wanted to gift them to her. It was all Banier’s fault, said Thibout: He kept harassing her to accept Liliane’s gifts in order to compromise her and shut her up. She sent the deeds to get Banier off her back, but never followed up. She described Banier as someone who was initially amusing but eventually became “omnipresent and had a terrible hold on [Madame Bettencourt]. He interfered in everything, from her employees to her guests and her friends . . . He’s the one who organized the whole household.” Among other accusations, she recounted the story of Banier’s alleged attempt to get his hands on the heiress’s jewelry collection, a claim that the photographer denied.
Thibout was no less critical of de Maistre, who she said “was not there to protect [Madame Bettencourt] but to protect Banier and his other interests.” She repeated her oft-told tale of de Maistre’s 2006 request for €150,000 in cash for Sarkozy’s campaign treasurer Éric Woerth. She said she had provided only €50,000 and presumed, based on de Maistre’s own remarks, that he had obtained the rest of the money from Madame Bettencourt’s Swiss accounts. Thibout’s claim, and the other elements that appeared to back it up—bank records, datebooks—was the basis for charges against both de Maistre and Éric Woerth.
De Maistre had much more to answer for than the suspected cash payment to Woerth. He was accused of abusing Liliane’s weakness to the tune of €12 million. That sum consisted of the €5 million donation he solicited from the heiress to support him in his “old age,” plus €3 million in gift taxes, plus the €4 million he had brought into France from Liliane’s Swiss accounts. In addition, he was charged with tax fraud for moving funds from Liliane’s illegal Swiss bank accounts to a tax haven in Singapore.
De Maistre’s appearance on the stand was marked by a whiny self-pity—he broke down in tears no fewer than three times—that contrasted sharply with his usual air of haughty superiority. He justified the €5 million gift as a “supplementary retirement pension,” and claimed that the steep hikes in his annual fees—from €500,000 to €2 million in six years—reflected his increased responsibilities. True, he had asked the heiress to buy him the “boat of [his] dreams,” but finally realized it was a “bad idea” and didn’t follow through. Like Banier, he denied that Liliane’s declining mental state affected her discernment when it came to spending her money. “Granted, she’s an elderly lady, but I didn’t think she wasn’t in a state to do these things.”
His response to Thibout’s claims about the €50,000 in cash was a petulant he-said-she-said denial of her “lying denunciations.” Everybody knew the Bettencourts gave money to politicians, he said, but they themselves were never called to account for that. “It’s easier to attack an underling like me,” he moaned. “I’m the ideal fall guy.” He accused Thibout of “inventing this story because she had nothing else and she wanted to compromise me.”
Concerning the €4 million in cash that came from Switzerland, de Maistre was at a loss to explain what had happened to it. “I can’t prove to you that I did not take this money, but I didn’t take it.” Madame Bettencourt “could have given it to lots of people”—perhaps “to politicians or others, I don’t know.” After rather ungallantly shifting the suspicion over possible political payments to the heiress, de Maistre insisted that he had “not given this money to Éric Woerth or to Mr. Sarkozy. The Bettencourts didn’t need me for that.”
That was an odd way to protect his “friend” Éric Woerth, who sat next to de Maistre on the defendants’ bench. But Woerth seemed unfazed. “I never received any cash from Patrice de Maistre,” he said with poker-faced confidence during his perfunctory one-hour appearance at the bar. Under kid-glove questioning from the bench, he admitted meeting with de Maistre twice, but never to discuss campaign finance issues. Yes, there were troubling coincidences involving the timing of these encounters, but “life is made of coincidences.” Though there was a strong circumstantial case against Woerth, no hard proof existed that cash had ever changed hands between the two men—it is, after all, rare that a person receiving illegal funds writes out a receipt. (The other embarrassing questions concerning de Maistre’s Légion d’honneur medal and Madame Woerth’s cushy job were addressed in a separate hearing a month later.)
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During breaks in the proceedings, Banier seemed oddly lighthearted, even playful, as he photographed lawyers with his vintage Leica and chatted amiably with police guards and reporters in the main hall of the courthouse. One evening, he attempted to climb the gates around the cathedral, damaging his shoes in the process. On another occasion, he crawled unseen into a restaurant where his lawyers were dining with several journalists, sticking his head up at the end of the table, barking like a dog, and howling with laughter. Such moments illustrated the “insouciance” that is often attributed to Banier—a sort of happy-go-lucky carelessness. But it was also his way of blowing off steam, sublimating his fear, and minimizing the danger he faced. “He told us he was in an unreal world for five weeks,” recalls his lawyer, Laurent Merlet.
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By the time the trial moved into its final week, all eight of the defendants present had testified, as well as seventeen witnesses and five medical experts. Dozens of depositions were read aloud, Liliane’s TV interviews were screened, and portions of the butler’s secret recordings were played over loudspeakers—much to de Maistre’s squirming embarrassment. It was now time for the closing arguments, a moment of great theatricality where the eminent barristers, draped in their solemn black robes with starched white collars, stand at the bar and deliver their pleas with such studied eloquence that the best among them are called “tenors”—like the operatic stars they sometimes resemble.
Benoît Ducos-Ader, looking like a Roman senator with his receding mane of silver hair, delivered a sweeping condemnation of the defendants on behalf of Liliane Bettencourt. In a deep, resonant voice, his right hand waving in the air, he depicted Banier as a cynical schemer who “perfectly meditated his acts.” For proof, he cited a passage from one of Banier’s confiscated notebooks: “Play on one’s guilt feelings to obtain what they don’t want to give.” Don’t be fooled by appearances, the veteran jurist intoned. Banier is “not just a charming eccentric who rides around on his motor scooter,” but a “formidable” seducer with the “technique of a guru.” Turning his head to glare at the photographer, he quipped, “If they handed out Oscars for fraud, Banier would certainly win one.” Blasting the other defendants in turn, Ducos-Ader pronounced his conclusion with a disdainful gesture toward the eight men seated behind him: “These are the characters you will have to judge, these men who try to pull the wool over your eyes. There is no remorse among them. They’re just common delinquents turning around a pile of money.”
The most withering indictment came from deputy prosecutor Gérard Aldigé. A pudgy, white-haired functionary with the drooping eyes of a bloodhound, Aldigé stood at the bar for six hours and reviewed the details of the case in a droning voice until he reached a crescendo in his closing attack on the main defendant.
“Madame Bettencourt was only a marionette, with Banier holding the strings,” he thundered. “He knew everything about her, to the point where he could enter her room, even lie on her bed, and make himself at home. He was fully conscious of her vulnerability. He imposed his control over her like a spider spinning its web. And once he had her in his net, he never let her go. She became his thing. He dealt with her like a vampire.”
Banier’s legal team had the difficult task—some might say the mission impossible—of winning over a triumvirate of judges that seemed set against their client from the beginning and had heard nearly five weeks of damning testimony. The defense’s main line of argument was to concede that Banier was an “atypical personality,” and that the amounts in question were vertiginous, while insisting that he had brought happiness to a grateful woman who rewarded him of her own free will.
“One might find it shocking that a person chooses to cover a friend with gold, but that doesn’t make it an abusive act,” said Laurent Merlet. “That’s the choice she made.” The depth of the friendship between the heiress and the photographer was illustrated by the hundreds of letters they exchanged over two decades, said Merlet. The notarial acts that “regularized” Liliane’s gifts were mostly “confirmations of decisions” made years earlier, not the caprices of a fragile woman under the influence.
Banier’s senior attorney, the avuncular Pierre Cornut-Gentille, described his client as “an impulsive man” who could not help acting in “excessive ways.” Yes, he could be “familiar” and “rude”—he was a “mad dog with the personality of a child”—but that’s exactly what Liliane liked about him. All her life, the lawyer argued, Liliane had been seen only as the daughter and wife of important men, the heiress to an immense fortune. “Then one day in her life, this half-mad figure, Banier, arrives and makes everything explode: He recognizes her for what she is!” Liliane is not the “marionette” described by the prosecutor and the plaintiffs, but a free woman doing exactly what she wanted. “Respect her and her choices!”
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The verdict that Roucou and his associates handed down on May 18, 2015, was harsh. Banier, guilty on all counts, was sentenced to three years in prison (of which six months were suspended), fined €350,000, and ordered to pay a staggering €158 million in damages to Liliane Bettencourt. Martin d’Orgeval was given an eighteen-month suspended sentence, a €150,000 fine, and charged €2.3 million in damages. Patrice de Maistre copped a thirty-month jail term (twelve months suspended), with a €250,000 fine and €12 million in damages. Pascal Wilhelm received the same jail sentence as de Maistre, with €3 million in damages. Four of the remaining defendants, Courbit, Normand, Bonduelle, and Vejarano, were pronounced guilty but given lesser penalties. As it commonly happens in France, and was fully expected in this case, almost all those convicted filed appeals. The single exception: Stéphane Courbit, who paid his €250,000 fine and washed his hands of the whole affair.
Only Éric Woerth was acquitted. But the judgment hardly left him unscathed: The magistrates voiced their “strong suspicion” that he had in fact received money from de Maistre, but the investigation failed to provide irrefutable proof. Following the verdict, Woerth told a TV interviewer that he had “totally recovered [his] honor” and pronounced the political angle of the Bettencourt Affair closed. Not everyone was convinced that Woerth’s narrow escape amounted to an exoneration of him or Sarkozy. Antoine Gillot, attorney for Claire Thibout, Woerth’s main accuser, scoffed at his claim. “Yes, he was declared not guilty, but when you read the decision I don’t think ‘honor’ was the appropriate word,” he told me. As for Sarkozy’s role in the affair, Gillot’s analysis is scathing: “In America, this would be a scandal. A sitting president who intervenes and violates judicial secrecy for the benefit of one party in a strictly private matter would never get away with it. He’d be gone, resigned, game over.”
Banier had come to the Bordeaux courthouse that day expecting the worst. His lawyers warned him that a conviction was likely, and there were rumors that Roucou might send him immediately to prison. Cornut-Gentille told him to pack a bag just in case. Banier was somewhat relieved upon his arrival at the Palais de justice: The security guards told him not to worry; the special police unit that handles incarcerations had not been summoned. He sat stony-faced through Roucou’s hour-and-a-half reading of the judgment and showed no emotion when his conviction was pronounced. “It was judged from the beginning,” he says. “I understood from the first time he interrogated me that I was faced with a judge who didn’t want to hear anything and had already formed his opinion.”
Banier did not go to jail that day—the judges left him free on bail pending his appeal—but he had received a stunning blow. He stood convicted in a court of law of abusing a woman he considered an intimate friend, a woman who had been presented to the whole world as a batty old lady and a helpless victim of his cynical machinations. Apart from that humiliation, the court had immediately impounded one of his apartments and the proceeds of three insurance policies worth a total of some €80 million at the time. The €158 million in damages, if upheld on appeal, would leave Banier’s finances as ruined as his reputation. And if he was finally sent to prison, there was no telling how he would fare. That was a grim prospect for a man nearing his seventieth year.
And yet, he was still François-Marie Banier, the man who had rubbed shoulders with some of the most famous people of his day and was now, largely thanks to this affair, a celebrity himself. As he descended the courthouse steps, he was surrounded by a gaggle of fans—or perhaps curiosity seekers—who asked him for his autograph as if he were a rock star. Some wielded copies of his photo books. He smiled and joked with them, just as he did with the ordinary people he met while photographing in the streets of Paris. He had always considered himself a man of the streets.
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Judge Roucou and his colleagues had no respite following the four-week extravaganza. Three other Bettencourt-related cases came before them in March, June, and November 2015. The defendants were Patrice de Maistre and Éric Woerth (influence peddling); Judge Isabelle Prévost-Desprez (violation of professional secrets); and ex-butler Pascal Bonnefoy and five journalists who had published excerpts of his recordings (violation of privacy). All three cases resulted in acquittals. Mediapart director Edwy Plenel, one of the journalists on trial, was not surprised by Éric Woerth’s escape. “French justice finds it very hard to convict politicians,” he said. “They find a lot of excuses for public figures.”