In an extraordinary decision, a French court has ordered Mediapart to remove all transcripts of the infamous 'butler tapes' that helped spark the massive Bettencourt affair that is still continuing to this day. This is despite the fact that those tapes, whose content was exclusively revealed by Mediapart in June 2010, were last year accepted as admissible evidence in the judicial investigation into alleged 'abuse of weakness' against the billionaire L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt. They were also widely seen as the catalyst that transformed the Bettencourt affair from a family wrangle into a full-blown political and financial scandal.
The tapes were conversations secretly recorded by Pascal Bonnefoy, the long-serving butler to L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, who made them in a bid to protect his employer from people he claimed were doing the family harm. The conversations, mostly between Liliane Bettencourt and a string of advisers and confidantes, disclosed evidence of money-laundering, tax evasion, influence-peddling at the highest levels of society and improper interference in judicial procedures.
However, Thursday's judgement (see below), made by the first civil chamber of the court of appeal at Versailles near Paris, following legal action by the mentally frail Bettencourt's legal guardian Olivier Pelat and her former wealth manager Patrice de Maistre, ruled that publication of the tapes and their transcripts is an infringement of the 90-year-old heiress's privacy.
Overruling two lower courts that had ruled in the news site's favour, the appeal court said Mediapart has eight days to withdraw from its site “all publication of all or part of the transcript of the unlawful recordings made at the home of Liliane Bettencourt”. The news site will be fined 10,000 euros per day and per offence if it fails to comply. The court has also banned Mediapart from publishing “all or part of these recordings on any media, electronic, paper or other”.
Mediapart has already announced that it will appeal to the Cour de cassation – France's highest appeal court for civil and criminal matters – on the grounds that the judgement contradicts European legislation on freedom of information.
Mediapart editor François Bonnet attacked what he described as “Stalinist” censorship that represented “not just an unacceptable attack on freedom of information and a staggering reading of the European Convention on Human Rights” but which was also “wiping out one of the most important events of the five-year term of [President] Sarkozy”.
He said: “This has become a page of our country's history: how the richest woman in France, at the head of one of the biggest groups in the world, was defrauding the tax authorities, hiding her assets and negotiating with the political authorities, which in turn put pressure on the justice system. That existed – now it's forbidden to speak about it.”
Bonnet said of the judgement: “It has very real consequences for Mediapart with, let's say it, the real threat of causing our demise.”
The editor of Mediapart said the judgement made it impossible for the news site to do its job. He gave the example of how on July 4th, the very day of the Versailles court judgement, it was announced that in one of the separate strands of the Bettencourt affair former budget minister Eric Woerth and Bettencourt's former wealth manager Patrice de Maistre are to stand trial for alleged 'influence peddling'. This is despite the fact that the prosecution asked for the case to be dropped.
The claim is that in return for De Maistre hiring Woerth's wife Florence to work for Bettencourt, the minister obtained for the wealth manager the Legion of Honour, claims they both deny. “To understand this decision by the judges you have to refer to the recordings,” said Bonnet.
Bonnet noted: “This article is now banned, or it will cost us 10,000 euros a day. Except that not to quote the recordings makes the facts incomprehensible.”
The editor of Mediapart said he wondered how the website could operate under such censorship. “Will we have to insert the word 'Censored' in article after article in place of these quotes? As newspapers did under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, the Ceaușescu regime in Romania, or as some foreign correspondents did in Moscow in the Soviet era?” asked Bonnet.
He said: “The absurdity – to say the least – doesn't stop there. Here we are forced to remove every quote from these recordings, and not just in our articles. We must also do that in the tens of thousands of comments that have accompanied them, in the thousands of blogs that the readers have written.” Bonnet adds: “A simple search for 'affaire Bettencourt' in our search engine shows 894 articles and 1,615 blogs. A little calculation: 894 + 1,615 x 10,000 euro fines = 25,090,000 euros a day. Or 752 million euros a month! Mediapart's managing director Marie-Hélène Smiejan has confirmed to us: 'We don't have that!'.”
'The judgement is very open to criticism'
Mediapart's lawyer Jean-Pierre Mignard explained the background to the case and gave the reasons why they are appealing against the judgement. “Mediapart has been ruled against today having been supported by successive decisions by the local court in Paris and then the Paris appeal court, who had considered that Mediapart was working towards legitimate ends,” he said. “The decision by the court of appeal in Versailles seems to us very open to criticism because it knew very well...that Madame Bettencourt had been declared mentally incapable by a decision of a group of exerts. It was noticed in medical terms that she was having her frailty abused.”
Mignard added: “Did Mediapart infringe the freedom of Madame Bettencourt? Or did Mediapart help save her freedom? I'll leave it to readers with their good sense to respond.” The lawyer said that “of course” the website's view is that the use of the recordings was in the public interest. “But to these civic grounds, let's add altruistic grounds too: it was about an old and wealthy woman abandoned to the greed of swindlers who had decided to relieve her of a part of her fortune. Mediapart allowed this person to be saved.”
The lawyer said that in the light of this they would be calling on the Bettencourt family not to enforce the judgement. “We ask them to take note that if Mediapart had not made these recordings public, Madame Bettencourt, an elderly person a psychologically frail person, would today still be in the hands of those who were frittering away part of her fortune for their sole benefit.”
The transcripts of the tapes, which were handed by the family butler Bonnefoy to Liliane's daughter Françoise and then to police, principally concerned conversations between Liliane Bettencourt and her wealth manager, her tax lawyer and solicitor, and François-Marie Banier. They were made between May 2009 and May 2010, recorded on a digital Dictaphone placed behind a chair in Bettencourt's private office in her town mansion home in Neuilly-sur-Seine, just west of Paris.
Bonnefoy said he was prompted into making the recordings after he was subject to a campaign of ostracism led by Banier, who became the beneficiary in contested circumstances of gifts from Liliane Bettencourt estimated by police to amount to a value of almost one billion euros.
On January 31st, 2012 the criminal division of the Cour de cassation recognised that the recordings were admissible evidence in the ongoing investigation based in Bordeaux into alleged 'abuse of weakness' against Liliane Bettencourt.
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English version by Michael Streeter