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Hollande's Girl Wins €15,000
A French gossip magazine has been ordered to pay €15,000 damages to the lover of France's Socialist Party leader François Hollande.
A court ruled that the images Closer published of M. Hollande frolicking on a Moroccan beach with journalist Valérie Trierweiler were a breach of her privacy. Mme Trierweiler hit the headlines in June when Hollande's long-term partner Ségolène Royal booted him out of their family home for his affair with the reporter.
Much of political and media Paris was already buzzing with gossip of Hollande's affair, but France's strict privacy laws, and the much-vaunted belief that the public neither cares nor ought to know about the love lives of its politicians, kept the story from the papers.
Mme Royal, who plans to replace the father of her children as Socialist Party chief next year, broke the taboo by issuing a statement saying that Hollande would be free to "continue his romantic life elsewhere."
You can see the offending photographs here. In one, La Trierweiler has an arm around the well-nourished M Hollande, as he gazes meaningfully at her bosom. Another shows her rubbing his back - though she might well be trying to help him back into the sea; a third has the couple fumbling in the sand.
Mme Trierweiler works for Paris Match magazine, and has written profiles of François Hollande.
In the traditional French manner, the magazine will carry the ruling on its front page in the next edition. Both Hollande and Trierweiler urged that copies of Closer be pulped, but the court ruled against this.
The relationship between François Hollande and Valérie Trierweiler continues a long French tradition of political figures and journalists having affairs. EURSOC published a by-no-means-exhaustive list last December. We would add these lovebirds to the list, and also note that Socialist 'elephant' Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who is married to reporter Anne Sinclair and almost certain to take the top job at the International Monetary Fund, has since been revealed as quite the seducer of female hacks. So much so, in fact, that French civil servants have reportedly expressed concern that his smooth moves with the ladies could cause an international incident. It might work with French hackettes, warned one insider, but DSK is unlikely to impress the ball-breakers and lesbians who make up the US press pack.
