"Rest in peace Ari." In the evening this Saturday, Anthony Delon wanted to pay tribute to Ari Boulogne, the 60-year-old photographer who has always claimed to be the son of Alain Delon and found dead last night in Paris. "A tragic destiny. Sadness. A thought tonight for his two children, "wrote soberly the son of the famous actor and actress Nathalie Delon in an Instagram post, accompanied by a black photo with simply written "R.I.P" for "rest in peace".
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A tribute all the more surprising as Alain Delon has always denied being the father of Ari Boulogne. His mother, Nico, model and icon of the Velvet Underground, who died in 1988, has always maintained that her son was the result of a short-lived affair with the actor in the early 1960s. If this filiation was proven, Anthony Delon would be two years the little brother of Ari Boulogne.
In an autobiography published in March 2022, the son of Alain and Nathalie Delon recounted his childhood "raised by a nanny", talking about the blood strokes of his father, able to take out the whip because he stood badly at the table, to force him to run around a lake in the freezing night or to strangle him in the office of a judge. He had explained to Le Parisien that this book "was not a settling of accounts".
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His girlfriend placed in custody
Ari Boulogne, born Christian Aaron Päffgen, had filed in September 2019 an application for recognition of paternity before the judicial court of Orleans (Centre-Val de Loire), Alain Delon having a residence in the Loiret. In August 2020, the court had declared "the French jurisdiction territorially incompetent".
A decision confirmed on appeal in September 2021, because "Alain Delon reports proof that his domicile is in Switzerland". Ari Boulogne had instructed his lawyer to appeal to the Court of Cassation. The appeal is still pending. The legal fight could be taken up by his two children, Charles, 24 and Blanche, 17.
His body was found in a state of decomposition around 4am by the police, called by a woman, aged 58. She would be a childhood friend of Ari Boulogne and would have explained to investigators that she was returning from a trip to the region when she made the macabre discovery, accompanied by her son, 21 years old.
She was taken into custody for "failure to assist a person in danger". The measure was decided to "clarify the circumstances in which the death of the victim, who was hemiplegic, may have occurred," said the Paris prosecutor's office. The investigation was entrusted to the police station of the fifteenth arrondissement.
