Richard Berry’s eldest daughter, Coline Berry-Rojtman, who accuses him of sexual violence, was sentenced on Thursday by the Aurillac court for defamation of her ex-mother-in-law, singer Jeane Manson. Coline Berry-Rojtman’s lawyer, Karine Shebabo, immediately announced that she was appealing this decision: “My client is appalled, the parents, abusers and known, have a bright future ahead of them.”
The daughter of Richard Berry mentioned last year, in an article in the World, sexual violence she allegedly suffered when she was a minor, in 1984 and 1985, at the home of her father who was then living with Jeane Manson, accused of having participated in these attacks. “My father is still trying today to confiscate my voice by attacking this time my person, the adult, the woman, the mother of a family that I have become and that it is a question of destroying once again. But the destruction has already taken place, wrote Coline Berry Rochman last year. My narrative of the facts has never changed, many testimonies can be provided in support of this assertion, especially within my own family. Accusations that his father had then denied.
“Bad signal sent to children”
Born in 1976 from the union between Richard Berry and actress Catherine Hiegel, Coline Berry-Rojtman had filed a complaint for “rape and sexual assault on minors”, triggering the opening of a preliminary investigation, still in progress, by the Paris prosecutor’s office. Richard Berry, 71, denies outright, as does former singer Jeane Manson, who lives part of the year in Aurillac, where she had decided to sue her ex-stepdaughter for defamation. Manson “has, of course, never seen or even suspected anything of any kind, otherwise she would have been the first to denounce the horror of what seems to be alleged”, informed his counsel, Me Jacques Verdier.
And the Aurillac court therefore sentenced Coline Berry-Rojtman to a fine of 2,000 euros for defamation following this article and for the television program Le Live BFM, in which she claimed that Jeane Manson was part of the sect. children of God. Coline Berry-Rojtman was also ordered to pay 20,000 euros in damages to the former singer, as well as 5,000 euros in legal costs.
Also implicated, the journalists of the World and the daily, however, were not condemned. During the hearing on April 1, the prosecutor had not asked for a conviction against the world, considering that the newspaper had acted in good faith and had deferred to the court for the rest. “It is a shocking decision, of great violence and a bad signal sent to children”, Karine Shebabo still believes, deploring that this judgment comes while the investigation into the facts is still in progress.