'Brainwashing guru' stands trial in France
Convicted fraudster duped French family out of €4.5 million, prosecutors say
A "guru" who is accused of cheating three generations of a wealthy and aristocratic French family out of their fortune has gone on trial.
For a decade Thierry Tilly brainwashed 11 members of the de Vedrines family into believing that their lives were threatened by a secret masonic plot from which only he could save them, investigators say.
After persuading them to barricade themselves first into their ancestral chateau, then within a suburban house in Oxford, southern England, and employing what police described as "acts of torture and barbarism", he is accused of tricking the family into handing over up to €4.5 million (HK$45.12 million).
At the Palais de Justice in Bordeaux on Monday, Tilly, 48, went on trial for "fraud, abuse of weakness, violence against the vulnerable, and holding people against their will for up to seven days".
Investigators and lawyers are at a loss to explain how the small, bespectacled law school dropout and failed businessman with a conviction for fraud convinced the de Vedrines to part with their home, along with the family silver and their entire fortune.
Tilly was introduced to the family in the late 1990s by Ghislaine de Vedrines, 56. He was working at the school where she worked as its director. He claimed to be a descendent of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg nobility. By 2001, after Tilly convinced family members they were the targets of a masonic plot, they had barricaded themselves in their home, the turreted manor house Chateau Martel near Monflanquin in southern France.
After the de Vedrines, who had increasingly withdrawn from the world, stopped paying their taxes the French fiscal authorities seized Chateau Martel's furnishings and auctioned them off. In 2007, Tilly took them to Oxford, where they lived in a succession of anonymous suburban homes.
Tilly was arrested in Switzerland in 2009 after one of the family members told police she had been violently abused by her family and Tilly because she had failed to provide the "key" to the fortune they had convinced themselves she possessed.
Tilly has denied the charges.
"That man has made a career out of mental manipulation," Ghislaine's husband, Jean Marchand, said.
