The Billionaire, the Butler, and the Boyfriend

What Is the Series About?

*The Billionaire, the Butler, and the Boyfriend* is a three-part Netflix documentary series about the Bettencourt affair (L'Affaire Bettencourt) — one of the most consequential legal and political scandals in modern French history. Directed by Baptiste Etchegaray and Maxime Bonnet and released on November 8, 2023, the series traces the slow unraveling of the world around Liliane Bettencourt, the heiress to the L'Oréal cosmetics empire, whose final years were consumed by allegations of financial exploitation, family conflict, and a political crisis that reached the highest levels of the French government.

The title itself is a compact roadmap to the scandal's central characters: the billionaire is Liliane Bettencourt herself; the butler is Pascal Bonnefoy, her longtime domestic employee who secretly recorded private household conversations; and the boyfriend — or more precisely, the intimate companion — is François-Marie Banier, a celebrated French photographer, writer, and artist who became extraordinarily close to Bettencourt in her later years and is at the center of the exploitation allegations.

The Case

Liliane Bettencourt was born in 1922, the daughter of L'Oréal founder Eugène Schueller. She inherited the company and went on to become one of the wealthiest individuals in the world. By the mid-2000s, when she was in her early-to-mid eighties, her daughter Françoise Bettencourt Meyers grew increasingly alarmed about the influence that François-Marie Banier appeared to hold over her mother.

Banier had cultivated an unusually close relationship with Liliane Bettencourt over the course of years. During this period, she allegedly gifted him enormous sums of money, artworks, and life insurance policies worth hundreds of millions of euros. Françoise Bettencourt Meyers filed a complaint in 2007, alleging that Banier had taken advantage of her mother's diminished mental state to extract these transfers — an act framed legally as abuse of a vulnerable person.

The case rapidly outgrew its origins as a family dispute. In a dramatic twist, Pascal Bonnefoy — Liliane Bettencourt's butler — secretly recorded conversations inside the Bettencourt household. Those recordings did not merely document Banier's influence; they also captured discussions that allegedly implicated senior French politicians in a campaign finance scandal, suggesting that Liliane Bettencourt had made illegal donations to political figures including those connected to then-President Nicolas Sarkozy and his ally, minister Éric Woerth.

Bonnefoy himself was prosecuted for invasion of privacy for making the recordings without consent. He was eventually acquitted on that charge. According to sources cited in connection with the documentary, as of 2016 he had been managing hotels in Bretagne, though his current whereabouts are not publicly confirmed.

Banier's legal journey was prolonged and complicated. He was initially convicted of exploiting Liliane Bettencourt's vulnerability, sentenced to two and a half years in prison, and ordered to pay approximately $150 million in restitution. He appealed the verdict and the case was sent to a new trial before different judges. In subsequent proceedings, Banier was acquitted on the invasion-of-privacy charge, though the full arc of outcomes across multiple proceedings remains contested in published accounts. The affair produced multiple overlapping legal processes — civil, criminal, and political — that ran simultaneously for years.

Liliane Bettencourt herself was declared to lack legal capacity by a court in 2011, a ruling that validated much of what her daughter had argued. She died on September 21, 2017, at the age of 94, never having fully regained public autonomy in her final years.

Production

Directors Baptiste Etchegaray and Maxime Bonnet approached the Bettencourt affair as a story with multiple competing realities — each principal character had their own account of what transpired, and the French media and judiciary added further layers of interpretation over more than a decade of proceedings. The three-episode format allows the filmmakers to structure the scandal chronologically while giving space to each of the title's three figures.

The series draws on archival footage, court documents, and interviews to reconstruct the affair. France's strict privacy culture and the ongoing sensitivities surrounding the Bettencourt family and related political figures likely shaped the documentary's access and editorial choices. The series was produced for Netflix's international non-English originals slate and released globally on November 8, 2023, with an IMDb listing under title ID tt29692617.

Reception

Upon its release, the series attracted significant viewership and was reported by WWD to have become one of the top-viewed documentaries on Netflix in the period following its debut. Critics and reviewers highlighted the inherent drama of the case — a story combining extreme wealth, family betrayal, secret recordings, and high political stakes — as making the documentary compulsively watchable.

Reviews noted that the series does an effective job of contextualizing the Bettencourt affair for international audiences unfamiliar with French political culture, explaining why a family dispute over an elderly billionaire's estate became a crisis capable of destabilizing a presidency. The three-part structure was generally praised for maintaining narrative momentum across the complexity of the case.

No verified IMDb numeric rating is available in the sources consulted for this article.

The Case Today

Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, who fought for years to protect her mother and pursue legal accountability, inherited the L'Oréal fortune after Liliane Bettencourt's death in 2017 and has been listed by Forbes as the world's wealthiest woman. The political dimension of the Bettencourt affair — involving alleged illegal campaign financing and the broader network of French elite relationships it exposed — continued to reverberate in French public life long after the main criminal proceedings concluded.

François-Marie Banier's current public profile is low. Published sources note an acquittal on the privacy-related charge and a heavily appealed conviction on the exploitation allegations, but a fully verified account of his legal status as of 2025–2026 is not available in the sources consulted. The scandal he stood at the center of, however, permanently altered how France discussed the vulnerability of the elderly ultra-wealthy and the legal frameworks available to protect them.