French Champagne magnate’s ex-mistress chased him with a knife and threatened to chop off his penis
An ex-mistress of a French Champagne magnate has been convicted of harassing him and his family when he ended their three-year affair — even chasing him with a knife and threatening to chop off his penis.
The 48-year-old woman, who was only identified as Samira L., first flipped in 2014 when she was dumped by Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger, the grandson of the eponymously named Champagne brand’s founder, according to Metro UK.
She started sending thousands of messages, the report said — including threats to cut off the married man’s “willy.”
“I want to kill you,” she wrote in one text read out during her trial in Paris, The Times of London said.
“I want you to die. Am I clear?”
The 70-year-old grandfather — who once told an interviewer he was paid to eat, drink “and make love sometimes” — initially replied with loving messages.
He even offered to put Samira up in a luxury apartment and pay her rent to help “calm things down,” his attorneys said.
However, the abusive messages continued, and in 2017 — three years into the harassment — he finally reported her to police.
Days later, the crazed ex took a train 90 miles to the Taittinger estate in Reims to confront him — and then pulled out a knife and chased the elderly tycoon down the street.
“If I had running shoes on, I would have caught you and I would have murdered you,” she texted him later, according to the UK Times report.
The ex — who the court was told has a “histrionic personality” — tried to blame her behavior on her ex-lover, spreading baseless rumors of deviant behavior.
“There was not a loving man on one side and a manipulating woman on the other,” her lawyer, Tom Michel, told Le Parisien. “Her existence was devoted to Taittinger… He controlled her whole life.
“She felt that she had been sullied,” he said of Samira’s actions. “She wanted to do the same back to him.”
However, Samira L. was convicted of harassing Taittinger as well as his wife, Claire, 76, daughter Vitalie — the current boss of the champagne house — and even another alleged mistress.
She was sentenced to a one-year suspended prison sentence, meaning she will stay free if she stays out of trouble.
The abuse “profoundly affected my client morally and psychologically,” Taittinger’s attorney, Nicolas Hubsch, told Journal L’Union.
“This lady has used slander to damage my client, to intimidate him and put him under pressure.
“She continued to use slander to defend herself, but the court was not fooled — it handed down a sentence twice that requested by [the] prosecution,” Hubsch continued. “This is a clear sign of what the judges thought of her defense.”
Taittinger has been described by Le Monde as “an exuberant playboy” and by his family’s own firm as an “aesthete, hedonist and humanist, at the same time a dreamer and a determined man.”
He became president of his family’s company in 2007 after organizing a $660 million deal to buy it back from American investors.
In 2016, Taittinger told the Irish Times: “I am paid to drink, I am paid to eat and make love sometimes, and drink wonderful champagne sometimes.
“Champagne is not only a wine, it is a symbol of happiness, a symbol of delicacy, of elegance.”
He also said at the time that when he retires, “I will have no mistresses anymore. My wife will be happy.”
Taittinger eventually relinquished control of the champagne company to his daughter, Vitalie, in 2019.
