The Big Picture
- The Netflix docuseries The Billionaire, the Butler, and the Boyfriend covers a scandalous true crime story involving tax evasion, financial abuse, and a political scandal.
- The series focuses on the exploitation of an elderly billionaire by her staff and alleged friends, and her daughter’s efforts to protect her.
- Pascal Bonnefoy, the butler who secretly recorded conversations that exposed the abuse, faced legal trouble for invasion of privacy but was eventually acquitted. His current whereabouts are unknown, but he was managing hotels in Bretagne as of 2016.
Netflix’s newest true crime sensation, French docuseries The Billionaire, the Butler, and the Boyfriend, has a pretty by-the-book ending. After witnessing three episodes of juicy gossip packed with shocking grifts and a real-life succession drama, viewers are treated to a series of cards explaining what happened to the characters of the story after they went to court to settle a decade-long battle involving one of the largest corporations in the world. However, there is a glaring absence in these final moments. While we learn that L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, the titular billionaire, was placed under guardianship and passed away in 2017, and that her so-called boyfriend, photographer François-Marie Banier, received a relatively light sentence for his financial abuse, there is no mention of one very important character: the butler, Pascal Bonnefoy.
The man who blew everything wide open with his secret recordings of conversations between his employer and her many visitors, particularly her asset manager Patrice de Maistre, was not tracked down by series creators Baptiste Etchegaray and Maxime Bonnet. Much like Liliane Bettencourt, her daughter Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, and François-Marie Banier, the titular butler is absent from the show’s interviews. However, he’s also absent from most of the story, being brought up only briefly when the series recounts how the Bettencourt recordings reached the French media, giving rise to a scandal of national proportions. To be frank, it’s even a bit weird that the miniseries’ English title is The Billionaire, the Butler, and the Boyfriend when Bonnefoy is hardly featured in the documentary at all.
But the butler — or should we say former butler — was indeed an integral part of the case that involved an elderly billionaire being exploited by those closest to her, tax fraud, and a political scandal that went all the way to the French president. Like most of the figures involved in the Bettencourt affair, Bonnefoy was taken to court for his actions, being eventually acquitted of invasion of privacy. The butler cut all ties with the Bettencourt family and moved on with his life. While it is pretty hard to find out what Bonnefoy is doing nowadays, there are a few clues online as to his whereabouts following the end of the Bettencourt case.
What Is ‘The Billionaire, the Butler and the Boyfriend’ About?
Covering about a decade in the lives of the heirs of the L’Oréal cosmetic empire, The Billionaire, the Butler, and the Boyfriend is a show about many things. It deals with tax evasion, undue influence of money over politics, and other schemes that the wealthy engage in to keep both their fortune and their status in the world intact. However, the show also focuses on how an elderly billionaire with flagrant signs of dementia was abused by her staff and her alleged friends, and her daughter’s struggle to free her from these predators — though it’s hard to call what Françoise Betterncourt Meyers eventually does to her mother a form of liberation.
The whole drama starts when photographer Françoise-Marie Banier is hired to take a few portraits of L’Oréal’s main shareholder and de facto owner Liliane Bettencourt. Trapped in an empty life and an unhappy marriage, Bettencourt finds herself smitten with Banier’s crass and nonchalant ways, quickly promoting him to her new best friend. Though the title of the series suggests a romantic relationship between the two, there is nothing to indicate that Banier was indeed Bettencourt’s boyfriend, with the series even stating that the photographer is gay.
Bettencourt and Banier’s relationship flows smoothly until the death of Liliane’s husband, André Bettencourt, in 2007. Following his departure, Bettencourt begins to gift her friend expensive works of art and large sums of money that quickly catch the attention of her only daughter, Françoise. Things get even direr when she finds that Banier has asked Bettencourt to adopt him. Convinced that her mother is being financially abused by Banier, she decides to take him to court. By her side, she has an unexpected ally: Liliane’s once faithful butler, Pascal Bonnefoy, who also fears that his mistress is being exploited out of her wealth. So, he secretly records over 20 hours of conversation between Bettencourt and members of her inner circle between 2009 and 2010.
Bonnefoy’s recordings did indeed prove that Bettencourt was not in a good mental state to be giving out presents, neither to Banier nor to anyone else, including her financial advisor Patrice de Maistre who was on the verge of convincing her to buy him a new boat. However, the 20 hours of audio also reveal that Bettencourt had been comitting tax evasion, stealing millions from France’s coffers, and possibly donating illegal sums of cash to the campaign of Nicolas Sarkozy, who was the country’s president from 2007 to 2012. Did she know that she was doing all that? It is unclear, because Bonnefoy’s recordings also prove that Bettencourt was starting to show signs of what was later diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease, with the billionaire even struggling to remember if she was in 2000 or 2010 in one of the cuts used in the docuseries.
At the end of the whole affair, Françoise managed to get her mother away from Banier and de Maistre, convincing her to sign a document that put her under guardianship. Since Françoise’s whole thing was that her mother was unfit to sign anything, this move is, at the very least, a bit shady. Sarkozy managed to get away with the accusations of taking advantage of Bettencourt due to lack of evidence, and Banier and de Maistre were both convicted to imprisonment and received a hefty fine. Banier, however, appealed and had his sentence drastically reduced: he was let out of prison, and the €158 million amount that he was supposed to pay in damages to Françoise Bettencourt Meyers was completely canceled, leaving him with only a €375,000 fine to cough up.
What Happened to Pascal Bonnefoy After ‘The Billionaire, the Butler and the Boyfriend’?
All of this is fairly well-documented in Etchegaray and Bonnet’s show. What the series doesn’t tell us is what happened to Pascal Bonnefoy after he turned in his recordings to Françoise Bettencourt Meyers. And, as it turns out, Liliane’ butler got in his own fair share of trouble for spying on his boss. Bonnefoy left his job in May 2010, about the same time he gave Françoise the evidence she needed to turn her mother’s life upside down. Soon after, though, he was taken to court by Banier alongside five journalists for invasion of privacy. The six were acquitted in a 2017 ruling on the very day of Liliane’s death, September 21.
Bonnefoy had a pretty simple strategy for recording Liliane’s conversations with her inner circle: whenever someone came to visit her in her office, Bettencourt would ask her butler to bring them a tray with coffee, water, and other goods. Beneath a small cloth protecting the tray from spillage, Bonnefoy hid his digital recorder. “I’m neither a hero nor a vigilante, I do my duty”, he once told the French version of Vanity Fair in an interview about his deeds. In the 2013 story, he explains that he feared that Banier’s influence over Bettencourt would erase everything that remained of her husband and spell the end of her entire estate.
“I wanted to know what was being planned. To protect the mistress of those that manipulated her, and, at the same time, to protect myself. I felt like I was on their way. They wanted to get rid of me,” he explains, referring to the plot to get rid of all anti-Banier staff at the Bettencourt mansion that is briefly mentioned in the show. Though he eventually left the household on his own terms, Bonnefoy was one of the employees targeted by that strange witch hunt. He was even questioned about whether he had testified against Banier to the police. This is what prompted Bonnefoy to buy the now-famous recorder that he used to spy on Bettencourt.
Bonnefoy left the Bettencourt mansion without anyone knowing what he had done. It was only after he was out that he contacted Françoise Bettencourt Meyers with the evidence that he had in hand, burned into 27 CDs. “Before, she would ask me how her mother was doing, and I would simply say: ‘Not good’. Later, I gave her the CDs and said: ‘These are conversations that I have recorded in her office. You will find out things. Whatever you decide to do with them, I accept the consequences’. We had tears in our eyes. Neither of us spoke about the content. She put the boxes inside a desk and I left,” recalls Bonnefoy. The consequences were, of course, his troubles with the law for invasion of privacy.
It is pretty hard to find out what Pascal Bonnefoy is up to these days. From the looks of it, the former butler enjoys a private life away from the media, at least ever since his acquittal. As of 2016, however, he was managing a couple of hotels that he partially owns in the French region of Bretagne, where he lived with his wife and daughter. Back when he took the job, he was blacklisted in all the richest households in France, and even people in his new village accused him of receiving money from Françoise Bettencourt Meyers to spy on her mother, something that he claims to be a lie.
The Billionaire, the Butler, and the Boyfriend is available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.
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