By the time the abuse case was reheard on appeal in May 2016, only four of the original ten defendants remained: Banier, d’Orgeval, Wilhelm, and the notary Patrice Bonduelle, accused of complicity in Wilhelm’s machinations. Carlos Vejarano, ex-manager of the Île d’Arros, died of a degenerative brain disease in April 2016. Nurse Alain Thurin, who had attempted suicide on the eve of the first trial, was tried separately in October 2015 and acquitted. Patrice de Maistre and Jean-Michel Normand both abandoned their appeals after reaching agreements with the plaintiffs.
De Maistre’s withdrawal followed two months of negotiations with lawyers for Madame Bettencourt. The financier’s aim was to avoid the eighteen months of jail time and reduce the €12 million in damages that had been ordered at the first trial. The damages, payable to Liliane as plaintiff, were reportedly cut to €5 million. The Bettencourt camp had no authority concerning de Maistre’s incarceration, but the withdrawal of their complaint against the financier led court officials to suspend the jail time. That was an immense relief to de Maistre, who had spent eighty-eight days in pretrial detention in 2013 and had no desire, at sixty-seven, to return behind bars. But he still had to pay the court a €250,000 fine and accept the shame of a definitive felony conviction. To add to his humiliation, he was officially stripped of the Légion d’honneur that had caused him such trouble, as well as the Ordre national du Mérite medal that he had received in 2000.
Curiously, the negotiations had been initiated not by de Maistre but by Olivier Pelat. While acting officially as Madame Bettencourt’s legal representative, Pelat also had in mind the interests of his childhood friend Françoise Meyers. And Françoise had good reason to seek a deal with de Maistre. A key condition of the accord was the financier’s abandonment of all the legal proceedings he had launched along the way, including, most significantly, his 2012 complaint for false testimony against Claire Thibout. Following on the heels of Banier’s action against Thibout and five other witnesses, de Maistre’s complaint had implicitly targeted Françoise. At a time when a Paris judge was looking into possible subornation charges, it was clearly in Françoise’s interest for de Maistre to abandon his action. In the opinion of Patrick Ouart, Sarkozy’s former adviser, that was “hardly the least important objective of this negotiation.” Ouart didn’t say so, but the deal also defused a possible threat to Sarkozy by effectively burying the mystery surrounding the €4 million in cash that de Maistre had brought in from Switzerland—money that he was suspected of funneling into the ex-president’s campaign coffers. Now de Maistre would never have to appear in court and answer any more questions about the money trail.
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The appeal hearing that began on May 10, 2016, covered much the same ground as the first trial. But the tone was markedly different. Presiding judge Michèle Esarté, though rigorous in her questioning, treated the defendants with respect. And Banier, who had undergone training sessions with a communications expert hired by his lawyers, abandoned his sarcastic, often abrasive manner in favor of an almost obsequious deference to the judges. Practically every answer he gave began with the ritual salutation “Madame la Présidente . . .” By contrast, Jean-Pierre Meyers, called as a witness by Banier, projected an air of arrogance and contempt in a three-and-a-half-hour appearance at the bar that was marked by his repeated refusals to answer questions from the defense. He pronounced the words “no comment,” or variations thereof, more than twenty times. Meyers’s performance won little sympathy from the court or the public, but then he was not the one on trial.
Though Judge Esarté bore in on the troubling questions—Liliane’s long history of ill health and mental confusion, the murky circumstances of Banier’s légataire universel designation, and his acceptance of the life-insurance policies—the civility from the bench gave the defense team some hope for a more lenient verdict. But their cautious optimism was tempered by lacerating final pleas from the Meyers lawyers and the prosecution’s call to uphold the harsh sentences meted out at the first trial. At the conclusion of the two-week hearing, Esarté announced that the final verdict would be handed down on August 24. For the next three months, the defendants were free to go about their business—under a sword of Damocles.
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Meanwhile, the wheels of justice began to turn in a different direction. On July 7, 2016, Judge Le Loire finally launched what Antoine Gillot had called “the atomic bomb” by putting Françoise Meyers under formal investigation for allegedly suborning witness Claire Thibout. Meyers had previously tried the judge’s patience by refusing to answer a summons to appear before him in April. This time she did show up for questioning, under the implicit threat of being arrested and escorted to Le Loire’s Paris office in handcuffs.
The judge got right to the point.
“Do you believe the testimony in your favor can be objective when [the witness] has received €700,000 from your own hand?” he demanded.
“This woman was drowning,” Françoise replied, “out of work, without a salary, with two children . . .”
Le Loire then read aloud from the transcripts of wiretaps placed on the phones of the six accused witnesses. Claire Thibout had told one of her interlocutors, “The daughter comes out fine, for them everything is OK, but she needs to show more support, because I’m the one who went on the line for her, eh! And . . . uh . . . she’s not exactly penniless!”
In a conversation recorded in May 2015, nurse Henriette Youpatchou is heard telling Dominique Gaspard, “We received less than . . . Claire Thibout in cash . . . and it wasn’t traceable.”
Le Loire asked Madame Meyers point-blank whether these witnesses had been “corrupted.”
“Absolutely not!” she answered.
It was at the end of this interrogation that Le Loire officially pronounced Françoise mise en examen—under investigation on suspicion of bribing a witness.
Meyers’s lawyer Jean Veil called the action groundless because the €300,000 in question was not a “payment” but a loan “that will be reimbursed.” The judge clearly did not see things that way and continued to pursue the investigation that could possibly lead to Françoise’s indictment and prosecution. Her lawyers say that’s improbable. “In my opinion, no one will even be talking about this in six months,” Veil predicted in August 2016. Nonetheless, Françoise’s legal team was sufficiently worried to make discreet overtures to the Banier camp in hopes of inducing the photographer to withdraw his complaint against her. The initiative apparently went nowhere.
In the event that Françoise were tried and convicted, she would risk three years in prison and a €45,000 fine. It would be the greatest of ironies if the person who triggered this decadelong legal battle became its ultimate victim. It would also be a serious blow to the image of L’Oréal. Up to this point, the family firm had managed to prosper in spite of the negative publicity surrounding the daughter’s suit, the mother’s creeping dementia, and the lavishing of hundreds of millions of euros in L’Oréal dividends upon an eccentric photographer and artist. CEO Jean-Paul Agon shrugged off the effects of the suit in a 2009 interview, calling it “a private matter that concerns the family but in no way affects the management of the group.” Indeed, the company consistently posted healthy growth figures throughout this period: an average 6.7 percent annual increase in sales between 2008 and 2015, with a surprising 15 percent jump in 2010, the year the story catapulted into the headlines. But a felony conviction of L’Oréal’s future principal shareholder might be more difficult for the company to shrug off. Says former L’Oréal PR consultant Seth Goldschlager: “Françoise’s legal situation is a problem, and it could become a bigger problem.” Just how much of a problem, no one knows at this point.
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One L’Oréal figure who made out quite well was Lindsay Owen-Jones. The dashing British-born executive, knighted by Queen Elizabeth, had led the company for eighteen years, then stayed on as president of the board of directors after handing over the top management job to Jean-Paul Agon in 2006. As OJ was preparing to step down as chief executive, Madame Bettencourt gave him a breathtaking farewell present of €100 million (on which she paid €30 million in taxes). This was in addition to his €381 million in stock options and €3.4 million annual retirement pension from L’Oréal. In her act of donation, Liliane stated that her gift to Owen-Jones was motivated by her “affection and personal gratitude for his exemplary performance in continuing the work begun by [her] father, Eugène Schueller.”
The donation was supposed to remain secret, but Judge Prévost-Desprez discovered the paperwork in a July 2010 search of notary Jean-Michel Normand’s bank box. Owen-Jones’s acceptance of this eye-popping sum from a woman whose mental faculties were presumably declining struck Prévost-Desprez as a potential abuse of weakness. If Banier could be pursued for receiving lavish gifts from the heiress, she reasoned, why should Owen-Jones be treated differently? But Prévost-Desprez could not pursue Owen-Jones directly because she was authorized to investigate only the complaint against Banier. She says she planned to cite Liliane’s gifts to Owen-Jones and others as potential abuses of weakness in her final report, but the case was wrested away from her and sent to Bordeaux before she got that far. “That way they limited the damage,” she says with a sardonic laugh.
Owen-Jones’s defenders point out that his gift was not comparable to Banier’s take because the former L’Oréal CEO had made billions for the heiress through his brilliant stewardship of the company over nearly two decades. Sales grew sixfold during his tenure, the stock price increased twelvefold, and Liliane Bettencourt’s personal fortune rose from €2.3 billion to €17 billion—an increase of 700 percent. Asked by a journalist if he had ever considered refusing the gift, Owen-Jones snapped, “On the contrary! I said thank you and I continue to say thank you. For me it was the final chapter of a fairy tale . . . I have no complex or regrets about it.”
Even so, there were questions about the propriety of accepting €100 million from an aged woman who was at the center of an abuse case. One source close to the Meyers family suggests that Owen-Jones did not approve of Françoise’s suit—and personally sought to broker an early peace settlement—because he was afraid of getting caught up in the investigation himself.
That didn’t happen in the end, because the 2005 donation predated by sixteen months the onset of Liliane’s “vulnerability” in the opinion of the court-appointed medical experts. The case that was finally brought against Banier and the others concerned only acts that occurred after September 1, 2006. Spared the indignity of a potential investigation and trial, Owen-Jones retired in 2012 to Lugano, Switzerland, in order to avoid French wealth taxes and sail Lake Maggiore on his 30-foot yacht. Standing at the bar of the Bordeaux courtroom, OJ’s erstwhile friend Patrice de Maistre voiced what he considered a bitter irony: “Today, I am here, and he is in Lugano!”
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Even as its former CEO crossed the Alps, L’Oréal itself finally obviated the Swiss takeover threat that had hovered over it since the beginning of the affair. In February 2014, the company bought back 8 percent of its capital from Nestlé, giving the Bettencourt family a preponderant 33.1 percent of the stock to Nestlé’s 23.29 percent. With Liliane under legal guardianship, L’Oréal’s future is now firmly in the hands of her daughter and son-in-law. As stipulated by the December 2010 protocol, Jean-Pierre Meyers is the director general of the Thétys and Clymène holding companies that control the family’s company stock and investments; Françoise is the titular president of both entities, as well as the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation. Jean-Pierre also serves as vice president of L’Oréal’s board of directors, on which Françoise and her eldest son, Jean-Victor, hold seats.
Though they may weigh in on important decisions, the Meyerses will doubtless follow Liliane’s example by leaving the actual management of the company in the hands of professionals like CEO Jean-Paul Agon. “This family has always delegated the direction of L’Oréal to someone outside the family,” says Marie-France Lavarini, a communications advisor to the Meyerses. “That has always worked well, and they want that to continue.”
What is less sure is the degree to which the Meyers sons, both unmarried, will be implicated in the firm. Though they will one day be the major shareholders, their passions do not appear to lie with the shampoos, gels, and hair sprays that made the family fortune. Jean-Victor, now thirty, is a fashion maven who designs upscale cashmere sweaters (all black or gray with prices starting at €650) for his own boutique on the rue Saint-Honoré. Nicolas, twenty-eight, who has apprenticed at Swatch headquarters in Switzerland, plans to create his own watchmaking company. For Liliane, who had L’Oréal running through her veins, the current bent of her grandsons might be disappointing—though she apparently never talked to them about their future in the company. All that matters little now: She is no longer aware of their doings.
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In his eloquent final plea for Martin d’Orgeval, Richard Malka compared the Bettencourt story to the ancient Greek myth of the Atreides, the descendants of the Mycenaean king Atreus, condemned by an ancient curse to destroy one another out of jealousy, ambition, vengeance, and the quest for power. The most grisly episode was the feast to which Atreus invited his rivalrous brother, Thyestes, only to serve up his three murdered sons in a delicious meat stew. The strife ended, fittingly enough, with a public trial in which Orestes, son of Agamemnon, was acquitted for the revenge murder of his mother and her lover.
The story of the Atreides is one that Françoise Meyers knows by heart: She devoted seven chapters to it in her book on Greek mythology. One passage that jumps out is her account of Electra, sister of Orestes, who we are told nurtured “one of history’s most beautiful hatreds” for her adulterous mother. Things never got quite that bad in the house of Bettencourt, but as Malka argues, “The reality of this family is not peace, it is war. You cannot grasp this affair without understanding its dimension of Greek tragedy.”
If the Bettencourts were not literally a family at war with itself, they were undoubtedly a family riven by conflicting desires, jealousies, and resentments. A family of things unsaid. No one talked about Schueller’s dark past—was that the original family curse?—or André’s proclivities, or Liliane’s discreet private life. Just as no one talked about money, or secret political payments, or Liliane’s not-so-secret loathing for her son-in-law. Most of all, no one in the family talked openly about Banier’s alleged machinations until Françoise finally lashed out. Following the death of the prince consort, the princess attacked the queen’s jester. But perhaps her real aim was to seize the throne and the royal treasure—and to defang and humiliate the queen who had always shown her more scorn than love. All this might be just a fanciful interpretation of this complex family drama. What cannot be denied is the ineffable sadness at its heart. As Tolstoy wrote: “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”