Hey Look, Sending Corrupt Former Presidents To Prison Is Fun And Easy, Oui, Oui!
Au revoir, Sarkozy.
Eh bien, tu regarderais ça! Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president of France and Mary-Kate Olsen’s former brother-in-law, has now reported to La Santé prison in Paris to serve a five-year term for criminal conspiracy. He’s the first leader in western Europe to get sent to the clink since Philippe Pétain, head of the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime of the French rump state, and the first former president of France to have the honor. Beats the guillotine!
For Sarkozy’s stint he’ll reportedly be housed in an isolation wing for his own safety, with his own security detail in rooms next door, and probably Gerard Depardieu and Truffaut DVDs and bowls of cigarettes. He arrived holding hands with his Italian-born former supermodel wife, Carla Bruni. Remember her, ‘90s kids?
Diversion time!
In 1991, Donald Trump was married to Ivana, and Marla Maples was his mistress. And the three had a well-documented confrontation on a ski slope in Aspen, one that class-act husband Trump himself seems to have set up to pressure a reluctant Ivana to hurry up and divorce him. The father of the year invited his mistress to sidepiece-along on their vacation, putting her up in a hotel in the same town, and a paparazzi photographer just happened to be standing feet away to capture the awkward moment when his wife and mistress met.
But the tabloid star scion didn’t settle down with Marla right away, far from it. He’d begun hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein a lot, during a period of his life he called his personal Vietnam … of vaginas!
Trump later even invited Epstein to his and Marla’s wedding in ‘93, once his divorce was finally settled and Marla had agreed to a “draconian” prenup. But in the meantime, Trump was sowing his wild oats all over town. And he tried to sow some with Carla Gilberta Bruni Tedeschi, then a top-20 supermodel, and well-connected heiress. But she had zero interest in his skeezer ass, and clowned him hard.
According to Harry Hurt III’s Trump biography Lost Tycoon:
“Carla does not, however, consider Donald J. Trump one of the world’s ‘great men,’ [...] After her arrival in New York he tracked her down at the Mayfair Regent hotel and tried to ingratiate himself. Carla mischievously informed Donald that her ‘sister’ was coming to town. He immediately offered to provide a room at the Plaza Hotel. The visitor was actually one of Carla’s longtime female friends, who showed up at the Plaza with a boyfriend in tow. Carla and her friends spent the next few days ordering room service and gloating over the way they fooled the ‘King of Tacky.’”
And Donald Trump has always been a prideful man. Soon after, somebody, probably John Miller, or maybe John Barron, called the New York Post and told them that The Donald and Marla were OVER, splitsville, and Marla had been booted out of the mistress-condo, because Donald and Italian supermodel Carla were dating now. Early Trump enabler Matt Lauer even covered it on NBC’s Today show! And then Trump “confirmed” this “scoop” to the Post, that Bruni was the “new one” in his life.
Sounds much like the Trump of today, spinning tales for his own benefit and bragging that a nonexistent deal is already done, like China letting the US buy rare earth minerals again, or claiming Qatar had given him a plane as a “GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE” as a way to pressure them to “donate” it. It’s a way to back the other party into a corner and either do what Trump lied and said they were already doing, or to deny it at their own peril.
Bruni immediately denied it to anyone who would listen, telling the Daily Mail, “Trump is obviously a lunatic. It’s so untrue, and I’m deeply embarrassed by it.” She claimed she’d only met him once, in 1990, “at a big charity party in New York. And I haven’t seen him since, of that I’m sure,” and said Trump dreamed the whole thing up for publicity. Who, him? And, but, nevertheless, over the next 35 years Bruni has been forced to refute the claim until she was bleu au visage.
FLASHBACK!
Diversion over!
Where were we? Ah yes, Nicolas Sarkozy! After sowing some folle avoine of her own, including with Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger, and starting her own music career, Carla Bruni found her forever man in the twice-married recently-elected President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. In 2008 they married at the Élysée Palace after an 11-week courtship, and spent their wedding night at the Palace of Versailles.
But Sarkozy, it seems, had a bit of dirty laundry. In 2020 he went on trial for allegations that he bribed a judge with a retirement package in return for information about an investigation into campaign finance violations over payments he got from L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt. He was convicted of graft, and forced to wear an ankle bracelet and stripped of his Legion of Honor distinction. And then, in this separate case, he was accused of funding his 2007 presidential campaign with millions of euros in Libyan cash from Muammar Gaddafi. At the time, Gaddafi wanted help improving Libya’s image after the 1988 bombing of a passenger jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, and another over Niger in 1989.
But the image makeover didn’t work, and Gaddafi met a grisly end in the Arab spring of 2011. Hey, remember his lady bodyguards? Take notes, Noem and Bondi.
Sarkozy was convicted of criminal conspiracy, though acquitted on charges of embezzling Libyan public funds, passive corruption and illicit financing of an electoral campaign. But Bruni, it seems, is loyal to her husband until the end, and the third marriage was a charm for Sarkozy as well.
He went to prison proclaiming his innocence, posting on X, “I will continue to denounce this judicial scandal, this way of the cross that I have been suffering for more than ten years,” in French, and said he planned to read Alexandre Dumas’s “The Count of Monte Cristo” and a biography of Jesus Christ.
Who could have guessed back in the 1990s that of those two men Carla Bruni did and did not date, the Frenchman wound up being the one to go to prison! C’est la vie. Sarkozy is appealing, and asking to be granted early release to be home in time for Christmas. Nous verrons!
[France24]
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As you can imagine, the Sarkozy news has been somewhat in the local news here. Still, out of all the stories I’ve read, I’ve enjoyed Wonkette’s, with their Bruni-centric treatment the most. Chapeau!
Hey, didn't some South American country put their corrupt former president in jail too? and how about South Korea also too?