Perfume of discord. This is a new episode in the family conflict that has torn the Guerlain family apart for 15 years. The son of the famous perfumer is summoned to appear on Monday January 17 for insults, death threats, intentional violence and moral harassment. Her father’s girlfriend accuses him of trying to run her over in the car. An investigation was opened by the gendarmerie for attempted murder. He denounces judicial harassment.
Jean-Paul Guerlain is now 84 years old, an old man weakened by illness. A photo, taken by a bailiff last November, shows him curled up on his sofa, wrapped in a blanket, trying to warm up in front of the imposing fireplace at his Yvelines residence. It is this situation that Frédéric Bélot, Christina Kragh’s lawyer, wants to highlight.
“One of the biggest names in perfumery and luxury lives in destitution, without heating or hot water with an almost empty fridge.”
Frédéric Bélot, lawyer for Christina Kragh
Christina Kragh, 63, the perfumer’s companion for 15 years, accuses his only son of making life impossible for them. “Everything is done to make her feel spied on, harassed or even threatened. It’s a strategy, an attempt to evict, a scorched earth policy, to try to drive her out of the home. She is exhausted, weighs only 48 kg, mortified by constant stress”, gets carried away Frédéric Bélot.
The lawyer therefore called a bailiff three times, between November 16 and 23, with this observation: “The weather is cold. The temperature is cool in the house, below 15 degrees, and the humidity is high, he notes. I visit the dressing room and I see that the drawers and cupboards are poorly stocked with warm clothes and in particular no cashmere clothes”, before adding “that the wood has not been brought as close as possible under the awning and that Christina is unable to carry logs for a long distance in her arms”.
“Big Anything” retorts the lawyer of Stéphane Guerlain, master Pascal Koerfer. “The boiler was cut, it took a few days to find a repairman, Stéphane even brought extra heaters for his father”.
To understand how the trio got there, we have to go back to 2007. At the time, the attractive Jean-Paul Guerlain, described by those close to him as “a ladies’ man, falls under the spell of Christina Kragh, a slender Franco-Danish, passionate like him for horses, in a social reception in Geneva. Very quickly she will come to settle in his home, in the family property of 700 square meters, the Domaine des Mesnuls, located near the forest of Rambouillet, in the Yvelines.
Stéphane Guerlain, he has doubts. At the beginning of 2013, a gallery owner in Paris calls him, very annoyed. A lady tries to sell him a painting by Delacroix. That woman is Christina Kragh. However, in this small environment, everyone knows that the work belongs to the famous perfumer.
In the aftermath, Stéphane Guerlain, who is also a lawyer, made a request for reinforced curatorship, especially as his father’s health declined. He moves around the property, makes an inventory of all the goods. On the spot, he discovers that his father’s entourage is defecting. One by one, his driver, with whom the famous perfumer went for lunch every lunchtime at the local bistro, his maid, his cook, and his secretary left the premises, harassed, they say, by their employer’s new companion.
In 2018, curatorship was transformed into guardianship by the judge seen “the increasingly great alteration of Mr. Guerlain’s faculties”, notes master Pascal Koerfer. Jean-Paul Guerlain is affected according to a recent expertise of a form of Alzheimer’s disease. Christina Kragh will launch nearly eight procedures to demand a change of guardian, but justice refuses. Same relentlessness to marry Jean-Paul Guerlain, but there too, justice opposes it. A justice that still released her last October. The prosecutor of Versailles had her summoned to appear for “neglect, abandonment, endangerment and lack of care for a vulnerable person”. If the court found that she had indeed deprived her spouse of care, this did not constitute, legally, “the offense of abandonment”.
A few weeks later, on December 10, Christina Kragh went to the gendarmerie of Montfort-L’Amaury, to denounce an attempted murder of which she was the victim, according to her, a month earlier. In this complaint that franceinfo was able to consult, she says that Stéphane’s car, just before entering her property, arrives behind her and hits her at hip level. She then threw herself on the ground. Fortunately, thanks to the big coat she uses for horses, she was not injured.
“It’s a judicial harassment, to try to discredit the figure of the guardian” denounces the other lawyer of the son of the perfumer, master Olivier Combe “because she broke her teeth on the wedding”. “She tries to light firewalls”, abounds Pascal Koerfer, who deplores the media coverage of the conflict for a family that has always cultivated discretion. “My client can’t take it anymore and at the same time he tells me he has no right to give up.”
“He promised his father that until the end of his life he would stay in his house. He feels a moral and emotional responsibility.”
Pascal Koerfer, lawyer for Stéphane Guerlain
Christina Kragh, she continues to multiply the legal proceedings against her. This Monday, Stéphane Guerlain must be tried for death threats, willful violence and harassment. In a recording of May 26, 2020, which she produced and entrusted to justice, he treats her of “bitch”, and threatens him “put your head in a haystack” and “to attack his horses”. And he has just learned that he will soon be summoned again for willful violence against him.
Guerlain, the perfume of discord – Gaële Joly’s investigation
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