Paris has seen a run of blockbuster trials this year, involving an ex-dictator, a former prime minister, a huge rogue trade scandal and a billionaire heiress — and all have one thing in common.
At each of the courts trying Panama’s General Noriega, French former prime minister Dominique de Villepin and trader Jerome Kerviel, one man has lurked: Olivier Metzner, a lawyer whose high-profile caseload has made him a celebrity.
Pursued by television cameras, the 60-year-old entertained reporters and enraged witnesses and rival lawyers with his provocative style, showing a talent for courting the media and for getting under his opponents’ skin.
Defending Kerviel last month, Metzner stood by calmly as he provoked lawyers, prosecutors and witnesses into fits of shouting, gazing at them quizzically over his half-moon spectacles.
“I have to destabilize the opponent,” he said last week at a brasserie near the courthouse where he was prosecuting Francois-Marie Banier, the man accused of defrauding billionaire L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt.
At that morning’s hearing, defense lawyer Herve Temime had bellowed in anger at Metzner’s tactics, criticizing him for citing as evidence sensitive secret recordings that have turned the case into a political scandal.
“I don’t care,” Metzner said, between telephone calls and puffs on his Upmann Cuban cigar. “I’ve always been that way. I don’t bother anymore about what other people think of me.”
The trial of the year has been that of de Villepin, who was accused of plotting to smear his long-time rival, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and wreck his presidential bid.
Villepin was acquitted in January — a triumph for Metzner, although prosecutors promptly appealed the verdict.
In March, Metzner defended the US airline Continental, which was blamed for the deadly 2001 crash of a Concorde jet in Paris, and also represented one of the firms blamed for a disastrous 1999 oil spill off Brittany.
“People just come to me. I never go looking for clients,” he said, describing his fondness for difficult and unpopular causes.
The three-week Kerviel trial last month was another blockbuster. Metzner has admitted meticulously planning the defendant’s media appearances in the build-up to it, which prompted sneering from the prosecution.
Standing in his black robes, Metzner played dumb and combative by turns as he tried to pin blame on Societe Generale bank’s managers. He was one of very few speakers to address the court without needing a microphone.
Two weeks later, he was back at Paris’ criminal courts, standing up for Panama’s ageing former dictator Manuel Noriega who faces 10 years in jail for allegedly laundering drug money in France.
As soon as that three-day trial was over, Metzner was out in the western Paris suburb of Nanterre for the Bettencourt case.
“What fascinates me is getting a universal view of the life of a society — through the Villepin case with the secret service [involvement], then the Bettencourt family dispute which is tainted by politics,” he said.
“In the Kerviel case, it was the challenge of defending a man against a system. The more cases you do, the more complete your view of society,” added Metzner, who was raised in the western Normandy region in a farming family.
With former clients including the French rock star Bertrand Cantat, who was convicted of killing his actress girlfriend Marie Trintignant, Metzner knows that his own work is part-performance.
“I don’t consider myself a good actor,” he said in Nanterre however, pausing to smile for a picture taken by a passer-by. “A good actor plays what’s in the script — I play reality. And at the end of the trial there is something at stake for a person.”
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