ARISTOCRATS BEHAVING BADLY
It’s the greatest scandal in 21st century Paris. By one police estimate, $1 billion was given by the L’Oréal heiress to François-Marie Banier, but it came with a very heavy price.
Tom Sancton was a longtime Paris bureau chief for Time magazine, where he wrote more than fifty cover stories. He first broke the Bettencourt affair for many American readers with his feature piece in Vanity Fair in 2010. Sancton coauthored the New York Times (and international) bestseller Death of a Princess, a probing investigation of the murky circumstances behind Princess Diana’s death. He has also written for Fortune, Reader’s Digest, Newsweek, and other leading magazines. A Rhodes scholar who studied at Harvard and Oxford, he is currently a research professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he spends part of the year. In 2014, the French government named Tom Sancton a Chevalier (knight) in the Order of Arts and Letters.