The legal troubles of French writer Regis Gioffret

The novelist's hat and the crime reporter's hat

Régis Jauffret is a 61-year-old French writer, born in Marseille, who has won awards and publications, and who frequently appears in the media, with over twenty works to his credit. However, two of them, dealing with particularly high-profile cases involving money, power and sex, dragged him into a French courtroom and forced him to fight for years. In 2010, he published a novel based on the murder of French banker Édouard Stern by his lover Monique Broussard. In 2014, he published a novel about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair surrounding the events in a suite at the Sofitel Hotel in New York, after which he was accused of rape by the chambermaid Nafisto Diallo. While many documentary books published about the two cases, the Stern and Strauss-Kahn cases, did not force their authors to hire lawyers, both of Gioffret’s books, which boast the word “novel” on their backs, cost their authors years of courtroom deliberations. Gioffret expresses great indignation at the “lack of respect” with which he was treated and the “restriction of his freedom as a novelist” while criminal writers were not harassed at all. What is the meaning of the difference in treatment?

The Murder of Edouard Stern: The Affair, the Romance, and the Legal Prosecution

Edouard Stern was a French banker, one of the richest in the country, close to the world's elite, a handsome and tall man, who was murdered in 2005 by his lover Cecile Broussard, who had a reputation in the Swiss sado-masochism scene. A scion of a well-known banking family, owners of the Stern Bank, Edouard took over the management of the family bank until he sold it in 1985, and moved on to serve as one of the senior executives of the Lazard Bank. In 1997, he left the Lazard Bank, after differences of opinion with his father-in-law, David-Will, the chairman of the bank, and founded his own investment fund. And an Israeli point can be added to the curiosity: Stern was mentioned as one of the candidates for the acquisition of Bank Hapoalim and Discount Bank. Edouard Stern was a shark of the financial world and his business conduct was controversial. His private life was also particularly turbulent.

In 1983, he married Beatrice David-Will, the eldest daughter of banker Michel David-Will, then chairman of Banque Lazare. The couple had three children, but divorced in 1998. Beatrice always maintained a good relationship with her ex-husband. On February 28, 2005, Stern was murdered by his lover Monique Broussard during an erotic game. The day after the murder, Stern was found lying on the floor of his luxurious duplex apartment on the fifth floor of a building in Geneva, shot at point-blank range, two bullets in the head and two more in the chest and stomach. He was wearing a pink latex suit and shackled to a chair. His face was covered by a mask with three holes, for the eyes and mouth. Cecile Broussard fled to Australia after the murder, but stayed in Sydney for only 24 hours. She was arrested at the airport upon her return, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced in June 2009 to eight and a half years in prison, a fairly light sentence compared to the crime. In November 2010, she was released on parole for good behavior.

In June 2009, Regis Gioffret covered the trial of the murderer, Cécile Broussard, which was being held in Geneva, for the newspaper “Le Nouvelle Observateur”. In an article published in the newspaper, Gioffret comes to the conclusion that Cécile Broussard planned the murder down to the last detail and carried it out in cold blood. According to Gioffret, Cécile Broussard knew how to outwit everyone around her, including the psychiatrist who diagnosed her with low intelligence – she was one point short of being defined as mildly retarded. A year later, Gioffret published the novel that illustrates the opinion he expressed in the article and presents the murder as premeditated. The novel consists of a long monologue from the mouth of the murderer, who is in prison and about to be released. From there, she tells the story of the murder, her escape to Sydney, Australia, and her return, retelling the recent past – her relationship with her lover – and the distant past – her life story from childhood. The names of the three main characters are not mentioned, nor are the names of the secondary characters, but the plot is based on the story of Cecile Broussard, her husband and lover. If it had not been for the Edouard Stern affair, there would not have been this novel, called “The Punisher with Severity.”

However, the monologue is written in the style of Regis Joffre, a skilled professional, and his artistic imprint also dominates the structure of the novel and the transitions from the present to the past. And not only that: from the things Joffre puts in the speaker's mouth, we can learn about the way he sees the personality of the murderer, her husband, and her lover. And the deep psychological aspects of Joffre, as well as his writing, in this novel - are fascinating. The author reveals the abuses suffered by the destitute escort girl in her childhood and adolescence and alludes to those suffered by the high-ranking banker, cruelties that turned the adult lives of the two unfortunates into a tragic scenario. Particularly touching is the scene in which the banker takes his partner for a night out in a musty hotel in a Parisian immigrant district, where he cries and expresses his fear of wolves, he who kills animals of prey in abundance on expensive safari trips.

The title, “The Punisher with Severity,” is understood as an ironic reference to the murder. The end of the novel clearly and in detail illustrates Joffre’s conclusion that Cécile Broussard planned the murder in a calm manner, contrary to her claim in court that she acted out of momentary rage. However, the reader may also understand the title in the masculine, “The Punisher with Severity,” because the French word Sévère is an adjective that is both masculine and feminine. The couple’s relationship was characterized by a reversal of roles, with the speaker sometimes being the submissive and humiliating one and sometimes the submissive and humiliated one. Many times in the novel, she expresses her dissatisfaction with the role of the controlling woman that her partner assigns to her – but whether she is trustworthy, Joffre believes not. Or perhaps the “Punishers with Severity” are the abusive parents of the two protagonists who poisoned their lives without any hope of recovery. The banker comes from a privileged and influential family, the upper echelons of society. His partner was the daughter of parents from what is commonly called the weaker sections of the population. But their similarities outweighed their differences and were enough to unite them in a love-hate relationship that lasted four years.

Although the word “novel” next to the title can be considered justified, the plot leaves no room for doubt about the identity of the protagonists. Gallimard, fearing a lawsuit from the Stern family, was unwilling to risk publishing the novel, which was eventually published by La Sey. Stern’s family was, as expected, furious about Gioffret’s book and, as stated, filed a lawsuit in court for shameful exploitation of the drama they had gone through. Gioffret argued in his defense that in the press and in a documentary published about Stern’s life and death, things were said that were many times worse than his own words in the novel. When a murder occurs, Gioffret argues, it is no longer possible to talk about private lives being expropriated and transferred to the public domain. And Gioffre’s main argument is that any book called a novel must enjoy creative freedom and freedom of expression without any reservations. The novelist lies like a murderer, has no respect for the living or the dead, for his good name or for morality, but he does not murder anyone. Between the pages of the book are sentences, commas, and periods, nothing more. No murder is committed in it, no living creature is imprisoned in it. This view of the freedom of the novel was supported by a petition in defense of Joffre, signed by 10 well-known writers, including Brenner-Henri Lévy, Michel Houellebecq, Philippe Sollers, Frédéric Bégabé, Yann Moix, Virginie Defant, and Jonathan Little.

Stern's ex-wife, their three children, and one of the murdered man's half-sisters filed a lawsuit against Gioffret for invasion of privacy and demanded that his book be removed from the market. The family's lawyer argued that while journalists' job is to inform the public, the author sought to entertain them and profit commercially from the high-profile drama. The book he wrote brought the affair back into the headlines and only increased the trauma of the family, who had a duty to protect the murdered man's three children. After two years of proceedings, Stern's family decided to give up their demand to remove Gioffret's book from the market and abandoned their legal battle against the author and the book publisher. That was enough, they said, for them to have their voice heard regarding the invasion of privacy.

The Dominique Strauss-Kahn Story at the Sofitel Hotel: The Affair, the Romance, and the Trial

In May 2011, the well-known economist Dominique Strauss-Kahn was forced to resign from his position as chairman of the International Monetary Fund after being accused of sexual assault by a chambermaid at the Sofitel Hotel in New York where he was staying, Nafisto Diallo. In August 2011, a New York court dismissed the charges against him, and a few months later, following a civil lawsuit by Diallo, the two sides reached a settlement for damages, the details of which remain confidential. The Sofitel affair put an end to Strauss-Kahn's promising run as the Socialist Party's candidate for president of France , as well as to his marriage to the popular and wealthy journalist Anne Sinclair. Following the revelations of the international scandal, she finally decided to divorce her profligate husband, but not before supporting him and paying the numerous expenses, millions of dollars, from her personal account until the settlement with the plaintiff Diallo was finalized.

The Sofitel affair seemed to have ended legally on August 23, 2011, when an American court dismissed the charges of imprisonment, assault, and rape against Strauss-Kahn. But the affair surprisingly resurfaced in 2014, this time against the backdrop of journalist and author Regis Gioffre’s book, “The Ballad of Riker’s Island.” The title is a nod to Oscar Wilde’s long poem: “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” In the terrible Reading Gaol, in the city of Reading, the capital of the county of Berkshire, 64 miles from London, Oscar Wilde served the last months of his sentence after being sentenced on May 19, 1897, to two years in prison with hard labor (homosexuality was considered a criminal offense under British law until 1967). Reading Gaol closed in 2013 and is soon to be used as a cultural center. Riker Island is the name of the infamous prison, the largest in New York and the second largest in the United States, located on an island of the same name, to which Strauss-Kahn was temporarily transferred after his arrest at John F. Kennedy Airport.

For the purposes of writing the book, which also boasts the word “novel,” Regis Gioffret went to Senegal and Guinea, following Nafisto Diallo’s past, and to New York, to continue investigating her life as well as the developments of the affair that brought her to the headlines. The chapters documenting his investigations are written in the first person. The rest of the book is written in the third person, without using the name Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Throughout the book, the story is about a high-ranking man, the president of an international financial institution, a man of flesh and blood, and so on, with the detailed physical description of the hero matching that of Strauss-Kahn. The female protagonist, on the other hand, is introduced by her name, Nafisto Diallo. The book is about 400 pages long, and at the end there is a detailed and explicit description in which the hero attacks the chambermaid Nafisto Diallo in a suite at the Sofitel Hotel in New York and forces oral sex on her. Diallo is presented in the book as a victim and the high-profile economist is presented as a rapist, while the court dropped the charges against Strauss-Kahn.

In this novel, as in its predecessor, Gioffret presents his personal opinion on the event that reached the courtroom: the novel “The Punisher” returns at the end to the murder of the banker by his lover and his meticulous planning in advance, the novel “The Ballad of Riker’s Island” ends with the rape of the high-ranking economist by his chambermaid Nafisto Diallo. As part of the book’s promotional campaign, Gioffret was interviewed on Radio France Inter. The day after the interview, Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer announced his intention to file a defamation lawsuit against Regis Gioffret and the Le Cy publishing house for the content of the book and against Radio France Inter for Gioffret’s words. The lawyer noted that Strauss-Kahn’s name is not mentioned in the book, but the description in it leaves no room for doubt about the hero’s identity, especially since the name was quoted by Gioffret in an interview on Radio France Inter. The lawyer adds and clarifies that the description of the rape in the book is defamatory because the American court dropped the lawsuit against Strauss-Kahn and closed the case. The author's opinion therefore contradicts the court's decision. The lawyer also rejects the definition "novel" that appears on the back of Gioffret's book. In his opinion, it is a book and not a novel.

At the court hearing on March 24 of this year, the writer's defense argued for his absolute right to use an unusual incident from life for the purposes of a novel, exaggerating its lines and mixing up its details. It went on to say that Strauss-Kahn had lost his right to privacy and that the incident in which he was involved was now public property. The entire world had already expressed its opinion on the scandal. The court replied that defining the book as a "novel" was not enough to protect its author and exempt him from any punishment. The last chapter is a realistic, even clinical, description of a rape scene, which its location at the end of the book gives it special emphasis. Furthermore, the word "rape" is explicitly written three times. Regis Gioffre was therefore sentenced to pay a suspended fine of €1500, €000 in damages to the plaintiff for the mental harm caused to him by certain passages in the book, and €10 for the words said in a radio interview during the book's promotion campaign. In addition, the court prohibited the printing of a new edition containing the passages deemed defamatory.

The Literary Republic vs. the French Republic

Regis Gioffret lost the lawsuit brought against him by Strauss-Kahn, but the voices of some of his colleagues who signed the petition in his defense at the time of the Stern family's lawsuit have not been silenced. They are once again coming to his defense and condemning the court's decision. The issue goes beyond the individual case of Gioffret's repeated entanglements and confronts two opposing views. There are those in the literary world, writers and publishers, who believe that the novel is a large and free space in which no laws apply and in which the writer can express his creativity - to lie, to distort reality, to invent, without chains or restrictions. The only law between the pages of the novel is the freedom of the writer and the main role of the publisher is to protect this freedom. There is nothing in common between the puppet characters trapped in the words of the novel and the people who were born into reality, live and die in it. Contrary to this view, the French court ruled in its latest ruling that the word “novel,” printed on the cover of a book, does not automatically grant immunity to its author. Infringement of the private life or honor of a person who serves as a hero in a book may lead to action against the author, his book, and the publishing house that gave him shelter.