PARIS — A French court yesterday ordered a photographer accused of bilking France’s richest woman out of cash and art worth $1.5 billion to stand trial for exploitation.
Francoise Bettencourt Meyers has waged a two-year legal campaign against the man she accuses of taking advantage of Liliane Bettencourt, her 87-year-old mother and the heiress to the French cosmetics giant L’Oreal.
Yesterday, a court ruled that Francois-Marie Barnier, 62, will be tried April 16-17.
The Nanterre court also ordered Liliane to undergo a medical examination before March 10.
Bettencourt Meyers, 56, an only child, claims that author and photographer Banier, 62, who has befriended other high-society celebrities in France, has taken advantage of her mother’s alleged mental frailty to wring gifts from her.
Liliane has a fortune estimated at $13.4 billion.
Last September, a French prosecutor dropped his own investigation into the affair after finding that Liliane was in full possession of her mental and physical capacities.
The daughter, as a member of L’Oreal’s board of directors, is in line to inherit all of her mother’s shares in the cosmetics giant.
Banier is a colorful character who zooms around Paris on a motor scooter and has befriended celebrities ranging from the late artist Salvador Dali to Johnny Depp.
In an interview with the newspaper Le Monde, Banier denied that he had ever taken advantage of Bettencourt.
The gifts, which included cash, life insurance policies, and paintings by Picasso and Matisse, “are gifts from a totally lucid woman, which I refused for a long time to accept,” Banier said.
Banier said he met Liliane in 1969 when he was 22, when he began discussing poetry with her husband. He says he exchanged “thousands” of letters with the older woman over the years.
“What shocks people is that a woman of her standing would break conventions like this,” Banier said. “What she gave me is nothing alongside what she taught me.”