JOAN MANSON. The Paris prosecutor’s office closed the investigation targeting Richard Berry and his former wife Jeane Manson without further action due to prescription. She was accused of sexual violence on Coline Berry.
[Mis à jour le 1 septembre 2022 à 11h05] The investigation targeting Richard Berry and his former wife, Jeane Manson, was dismissed due to prescription by the Paris prosecutor’s office, Wednesday August 31, according to information from BFM TV. The procedure was opened on January 25, 2021 after a complaint filed by Coline Berry, daughter of the actor, who accused her father of sexual violence and her former mother-in-law of complicity in incestuous acts when she was still a minor. The facts had been reclassified as “corruption of a 15-year-old minor” during investigations by the Brigade for the Protection of Minors, adds BFMTV.
“This procedure has been dismissed due to the acquisition of the prescription of the public action” confirmed the Paris prosecutor’s office to the same source. However, this judgment is presented and interpreted very differently by the complainant and the respondents. Coline Berry’s lawyer, Patrick Klugman, for his part, welcomed “the decision of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which after a long and meticulous investigation, takes note of the prescription and thus considers them sufficiently characterized and therefore probable.” He adds to AFP that this classification without action for prescription comes to prove his complainant right: “Coline Berry denounced these facts knowing full well that they were prescribed, for there to be an investigation. […] No one will be able to say that Coline Berry is a liar anymore, but simply that the facts can no longer be prosecuted.”
The lawyers for Richard Berry and Jeane Manson expressed their total disagreement with this interpretation of the facts. “Contrary to what may have been wrongly indicated, there is no reason to say that the facts are established. The prosecution did not say it and moreover did not have to say it”, insisted with the AFP Master Hervé Témime.
On April 14, Coline Berry was found guilty of defamation of her former mother-in-law, singer Jeane Manson, for claiming to have participated in “sex games” with the latter and Richard Berry and accusing her of being part of of the “Children of God” sect. Coline Berry was fined 2,000 euros and 20,000 euros in damages to be paid to the American singer. The daughter of Richard Berry has appealed: justice must again rule on November 9.
Tuesday February 2, 2021, Le Point revealed the Berry affair: Coline Hiegel Berry, 45, had filed a complaint with the Paris public prosecutor on January 21, 2021. She accused her father, Richard Berry of “rape and sexual assault on a 15-year-old minor by ascendant and corruption of a minor”, and Jeane Manson, her former mother-in-law, of complicity in incestuous acts while she was still a minor. Coline Berry described facts that would have happened, according to her, when she was a child, between her 6 and 10 years. Richard Berry and Jeane Manson were married during the same period, between 1984 and 1986. The Brigade for the Protection of Minors (BPM) had been seized.
In a message posted in Instagram story on February 3, 2021, Coline Berry wrote: “My father’s lies will not withstand careful examination of all the elements gathered so far”. She explains having been “kissed by her father on the mouth with his tongue” and having “had to participate in his sexual games in a context of notorious domestic violence” with Jeane Manson.
The worldwho had had access to the complaint, reported on February 3, 2021: “When the couple had custody of the children at the weekend, it would have happened to them, the morning after their antics, to invite them to the parental room to sexual games. The complainant’s father would then have offered to play the orchestra with his sexual organs and those of his partner (penis, breasts), the two adults being naked. (…) Mrs. Coline Berry would therefore have been forced to put his mouth on Mr. Berry’s sex, all in the presence of the other child (Jeane Manson’s daughter, editor’s note), and repeatedly.
Faced with these accusations, Jeane Manson has always denied in block. In the columns of Figaro on February 4, 2021, she said to herself “flabbergasted and deeply hurt to be taken to task in a family score settlement” and wanted to “wash her honor”. “I never participated in the so-called sex games she talks about, of course (…). If I had known, or the slightest suspicion, of the tiniest act against nature against Coline, I would have immediately triggered the legal process to denounce the author”, assured the singer to the newspaper.
On BFM TV, on Friday April 1, 2022, Jeane Manson still proclaimed her innocence: “I never hurt her. She has to admit it. I would like her to tell the truth (…) I would like her to say: ‘You know very well that I never did that to you, and you know very well that your father neither’. These lies must be stopped.” A defense maintained since, until the classification without follow-up of the investigation.
In addition to accusations of sexual violence, Coline Berry claims that the American singer is a member of the Children of God sect. This is also what the accused denounced in her complaint for defamation. The Children of God, also called The Family or The International Family, is a sectarian group created in 1968 in the United States. At heart many scandals, linked in particular to the discovery of incitement to prostitution, incest or pedophilia, the sect was dissolved in France in 1978, but reformed under other names.
According to Vincent Vantighem, journalist at BFMTV, Jeane Manson had denied being part of this sect during the trial for defamation in April 2022, indicating that he had welcomed musicians in 1976 who called themselves “The children of God” and who were indeed part of this movement has since dissolved, but which continues to have followers.
Born October 1, 1950 in Cleveland, Ohio, United States, Jean Ann Manson, known as Jeane Manson, became known in the 1970s first as a playmate, then as a singer. France discovers it with the tube before saying goodbyesold more than 600,000 copies in 1976. Its success exploded and the American, Frenchified, became one of the faces of French variety in the 1970s, alongside the songwriter Jean Renard.
In 1979, Jeane Manson represented Luxembourg in the Eurovision Song Contest: she finished in thirteenth position with her song I’ve seen it in your eyes before. In 1984, after having released several singles, she took part in the South-West tour, where she met Richard Berry.
Before meeting the French comedian, Jeane Manson had two daughters: Jennifer (known under the pseudonym of singer Shirel), born in 1978 from her relationship with producer André Djaoui, and Marianne, born in 1988, with journalist and producer Allain Baugrain-Dugourg. It was therefore in 1984 that the singer met Richard Berry. A stormy and conflicting relationship, which she told in the columns of Gala in September 2020. “We were two artists, it was the worst configuration. We suffered from a situation of competition. Richard knows very well that I did not have not been happy in our history so I can talk about it. When it worked for me, he was jealous, and when it worked for him, I felt in a weak position. The couple divorced two years after their marriage, in 1986.
Faced with the wave of the case in early 2021, Jeane Manson’s daughter, Shirel Sayegh Djaoui, mentioned by Coline Berry in her complaint, immediately spoke. The singer then assured that none of the facts reported in the complaint were true. “Me, she said I was in the room with them, so I’m the only witness. So I was 6 or 7 years old and I can tell you that nothing like that happened,” she explained. to BFMTV on February 4, 2021. And to add, in a Facebook post published the same day: “I have a mother who is very protective who would never have let that happen, and then I don’t remember . I know that Coline’s accusations are false from the first word to the last.”
Monday May 23, 2022, after her victory in defamation against Coline Berry, Jeane Manson was the guest of Do not touch My TVMonday, May 23, 2022. His daughter, Shirel, guest at Cyril Hanouna in the same way, explained: “It was Coline who called me and who said to me: ‘Do you want to testify with me in Le Monde?’ I told her: ‘But not at all, because I haven’t experienced that’ (…) And she had asked my mother the same thing. She wanted us with her, because we didn’t didn’t like Richard… Poor thing, now I get on very well with him”, explains Shirel, who has always ensured that he is on good terms with Richard Berry today, even if it has not always been the case.
“Me, I didn’t like Richard very much, because it was a very complicated marriage between them. They had a lot of passion and a lot of arguments so, as a child, it was stormy and therefore a little violent, not in the blows but in the form”, explains Shirel, before adding: “I did not appreciate Richard very much because he was not a great father-in-law very emotional with me. So that’s it, that’s all , that’s why I didn’t like him.”
In her testimony, Coline Berry explains that Shirel was present at the time of the events. What the latter denies. “If I wasn’t in that room that she describes, then maybe it happened, we can’t know. But if she says I was in the room and it happened with me, then I can know, since I was there. I say that it was not true”, assures the daughter of the singer.
As for Jeane Manson, she explained in TPMP to also be today on good terms with her former husband, Richard Berry. “It allowed us to reconcile,” sums up the singer, accused of complicity in incestuous acts when she was still a minor. An accusation which had earned Coline Berry a complaint for defamation and a victory for her former mother-in-law.