The former butler of L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, along with five journalists from from Mediapart and French weekly news magazine Le Point, have been cleared of invasion of privacy chargesin a ruling by Bordeaux court magistrates on Tuesday.
Between May 2009 and May 2010, Bettencourt’s long-serving major-domo Pascal Bonnefoy made secret audio recordings of conversations between the billionaire and her close advisors which revealed a catalogue of corruption and manipulation among the entourage of Europe’s wealthiest woman. Bettencourt, now aged 93, was at the time already suffering from partial senility and deafness.
The conversations, captured on a digital recorder which Bonnefoy had hidden in the billionaire’s office in her townhouse close to Paris, provided evidence of fraud, tax evasion, illegal political funding, the conflicts of interest of a government minister and interference from the French presidential office in judicial procedures. The first floor office in the mansion situated in the upmarket Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine was the scene of numerous meetings held between Bettencourt and her advisors to discuss her financial affairs.
The contents of the recordings were handed over to Liliane Bettencourt’s daughter (and only child), Françoise Meyers-Bettencourt, who had in 2007 lodged a formal legal complaint that her mentally diminished mother was the victim of manipulation by members of her entourage. That complaint prompted a preliminary investigation led by the public prosecutor’s office in Nanterre, whose jurisdiction includes Neuilly-sur-Seine, and which was closely followed by the office of then-president Nicolas Sarkozy.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In 2010, by which time the public prosecutor’s enquiries showed slow progress, the 12 months’ of secret recordings made by Bonnefoy were handed to the French police financial crime squad (la brigade financière). Extracts from the transcripts were subsequently revealed to the public by Mediapart and Le Point, which led to the opening of an exhaustive judicial investigation into the highly sensitive affair, led by independent magistrates.
Françoise Meyers-Bettencourt’s lawyers filed a new complaint over the manipulation of Liliane Bettencourt by members of her entourage.
The judicial investigation that followed the publication of the extracts (including sound extracts made available by Mediapart), which was latterly led by magistrates in Bordeaux, eventually led to the trial and convictions of eight people last year, several of whom received jail sentences.
Meanwhile, Mediapart’s investigative reporter Fabrice Arfi, his former colleague Fabrice Lhomme (now with Le Monde) and editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel, together with Hervé Gattegno and Franz-Olivier Giesbert from Le Point and former butler Pascal Bonnefoy, stood trial last November on invasion of privacy charges relating to the publication of the secret recordings. During the trial, in Bordeaux, the current legal guardian appointed to manage Liliane Bettencourt’s financial affairs, Olivier Pelat, gave his support for the journalists’ decision to publish the extracts – which were carefully chosen on the basis of their public interest. “They did their job,” Pelat told the court. “They allowed the abuse of [Bettencourt’s] frailty to cease.”
In their judgment announced on Tuesday, the presiding court magistrates, led by Judge Denis Roucou, dismissed the case against Bonnefoy, underlining “the state of necessity” in which Bonnefoy acted in order to denounce the manipulation of a vulnerable person, and which brought him no financial gain. “Pascal Bonnefoy’s action met the conditions of a state of necessity by safeguarding interests of which the value is superior to the interests that were sacrificed,” wrote the judges.”His act is therefore of social utility and society has no interest in punishing him, the punishment [would be] losing all social and personal usefulness.”
The magistrates also insisted on the mission of public interest that Mediapart undertook by informing citizens of a major political and financial affair. “As of the moment that public interest is at stake, the question of the invasion of privacy becomes more relative,” ruled the magistrates. “Furthermore, it must be reminded that by publishing extracts of the conversations, the journalists and the editor in chief took care to put to one side the recordings in which Liliane Schueller-Bettencourt appeared to be in most difficulty, which could have constituted a breach of the intimacy of her private life.”
“Clearly, these articles took part in debates of public and societal interest, notably the new societal debate regarding [political] micro-parties and the financing of political activity, without entering into elements of private life and the family conflicts that exist within the Bettencourt family,” the magistrates observed.
The court has therefore has therefore implicitly made official a judicial truth that was obvious: without the intervention of Pascal Bonnefoy, and that, in consequence, of the journalists who stood trial, the so-called ‘Bettencourt affair’, a serious criminal case, would have been smothered in a cover-up. In their ruling on Tuesday, the magistrates referred in severe terms to the involvement of the presidential office in the initial investigations led by the Nanterre public prosecutor’s office (which, unlike the corps of investigating magistrates, is accountable to the political authorities). In turn, their ruling also breathes fresh hope for whistleblowers who can now cite a “state of necessity”, as described by the judges, when denouncing grave misdemeanours.
During the trial of the journalists and Bonnefoy last November, the public prosecutor, Marie-Madeleine Alliot, asked the court to deliver sentences “of principle” against all of the defendants, recommending “a fine that would not be less than 1,500 euros”, although she advised against a sentence that would appear on a criminal record.
While Tuesday’s ruling was an important landmark for the freedom of the press in France, it does not put an end to the July 2013 ruling by the Versailles appeals court which ordered Mediapart to remove from its website all transcriptions and sound recordings of the secretly-taped conversations on the grounds that they breached Liliane Bettencourt’s right to personal privacy. That remarkable ruling (see more here and here) is however shown to be unjustified by the conclusions of the Bordeaux magistrates this week.
Meanwhile, the Bordeaux Court of Appeal will in May review all but one of the cases of those sentenced last year for “abuse of frailty” - the charge relating to the manipulation of the mentally diminished Liliane Bettencourt by her close entourage. The case involving Bettencourt’s wealth and investment manager, Patrice de Maistre, is not among them after Maistre, who was last year sentenced to a 30-month prison sentence (12 of which are suspended), withdrew his appeal last October, when he also renounced his pursuit of any other legal action regarding the Bettencourt affair.
François-Marie Banier, the socialite and celebrity photographer who received almost 1 billion euros in gifts from Liliane Bettencourt, and whose relationship with the billionaire prompted the initial complaint filed by Francoise Meyers- Bettencourt, has appealed against the three-year jail term and 375,000-euro fine handed down to him last year for “abuse of frailty”. He is also a civil party in two investigations he prompted, one into alleged “false testimony” by members of Liliane Bettencourt’s household staff and another targeting Pascal Bonnefoy yet again for “invasion of privacy”.
Below is the full text of the magistrates' ruling on Tuesday:
-------------------------
The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse