“
If I saw it and I’m very glad I saw it
.”
Invited to Léa Salamé's microphone on France Inter on Tuesday February 20, 2024,
François-Marie Banier
returned for the first time to the Netflix documentary devoted to the Bettencourt affair and broadcast since November on the platform.
Suspected of having benefited from the largesse of the richest woman in the world and heiress to L'Oréal, the photographer and writer was sentenced to four years in prison for abuse of weakness.
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“I
’m going to sue them twice
,” he revealed to the journalist and morning worker about the producers of the Neflix documentary.
One of which was for “
counterfeiting”
, he specifies.
Is he “
diabolical
” and “
fierce
” as described in the film by actress and singer Arielle Dombasle, one of the close friends of Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, only daughter of Liliane Bettencourt.
“
What’s very funny is that I haven’t seen Arielle Dombasle for forty years
,” François-Marie Banier reacts today.
“
It’s very nice what she says but it’s totally false
,” he still wants to emphasize.
Also read “It’s all fiction, shortcuts, bias”: Arielle Dombasle very angry with the Netflix documentary on the Bettencourt affair
The 76-year-old man does not have the right to publicly explain this matter.
He will never write a book to give his version of the affair as he confirmed on the air of his favorite radio station.
“
Because the people, who we take for idiots, they understand everything.
And so it's not worth it.
They know who she was (Liliane Bettencourt, editor’s note), and there’s no point,”
he explains before assuring that he was not “
derailed
” because of money.
“Banier doesn’t like money, he loves money,”
recalls Léa Salamé, citing the words of a witness in the Netflix film.
"
Who says that ?
Someone who knows nothing about it
, immediately replies to his guest.
Who sees me when?
Who knows what?
Obviously, someone who receives a lot of money thinks “but why?”
I would have been a woman, he would have been a man, there would not have been all these stories
,” he believes.
To the question, “
Does money buy happiness?”
» asked by the presenter of “What a time!”, he will answer in the affirmative.
After the release of
Scandal at the Richest Woman in the World
, Arielle Dombasle, who had nevertheless agreed to speak to the cameras of the documentary, did not hide her anger during the editing of her remarks.
“
She notes that her interventions, truncated, punctuate the program and put her at the center of an affair of which she was only one witness among others
,” we could read in her press release sent to AFP.
She sincerely hoped, on the basis of written promises from the production, that her testimony would serve a truth, honesty and objectivity completely absent from the final product.