RedHanded - Episode 388 - The House of Védrines & The “Guru” Who Stole it All

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

This story of how a rich, aristocratic French family lost their fortunes, and their minds, to a painter-and-decorator conman, unravels like Dan Brown mystery.Secret treasures, Masonic plots, kidnap and torture - the de Védrines family were desperate to hold onto their ancestral chateau; only to have everything ripped away from them by a Crowley-obsessed charlatan.Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad free. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. classics like MGM Grand Millions or popular games like Blackjack, Baccarat, and Roulette. With our ever-growing library of digital slot games, a large selection of online table games, and signature BetMGM service, there's no better way to bring the excitement and ambiance of Las Vegas home to you than with BetMGM Casino. Download the BetMGM Casino app today. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions.

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In the 1980s, a rose swept the country. Hey Mike, I really like this white Zinfandel. Well good, good. Now put it down, we're going to try another one. White Zin became America's top-selling wine. But most don't know that this sweet drink has a sour history. What began in 1986 with counterfeit bottles… A big fraud.

A multi-million dollar fraud. Sent investigators chasing one of the most powerful families in the business. The Lacharties. But the closer the feds got to them, the more dangerous things became. It's a story of deceit… At the time I was paranoid. Threats… You of deceit, threats, and murder. What started with a scheme to mislabel wine spilled into a blood-soaked battle for succession. Welcome to Blood Vines.

You can binge listen to Blood Vines exclusively and ad free on Wondery+. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple podcasts, or Spotify. I'm Hannah. I'm Saruti. And welcome to Red Handed, where I'm dragging you against your will and against mine. Uh oh. To France. No! I mean eventually. I'm scared of the names already. We're working on another top secret project and the majority of the pickups I'm forced to do is when I say people's names wrong. And it was a French name in the last one. So... This is re-traumatizing you from the Patreon days. I'm scared. Denzies?

And if you're an OG, you know it was me trying to pronounce Denise. Despite the very French title of this episode, we're actually not going to begin wending on merry way in France this week. In the first of infinite curveballs in this story, we're going to start this tall tale – a treacherous one – in Oxford. Not some secret French Oxford. Our Oxford. The one that's 50 miles northwest of London. In 2006, amongst that city's spires, cathedrals, northern lights, and university colleges, there lived a family. And ignore the image I have just conjured for you because the Deux

Vos-d'Orières clan were not living in any of the postcard bits of Oxford. They were inhabiting various little flats owned by a landlord called Andrew Scully. Some months before, Scully had been told by an acquaintance of his that the De Vendriens family were fancy aristocrats from France. So Scully didn't hesitate to rent to any de Vedrian that crossed his path. He wasn't that surprised when none of them paid him upfront. Andrew Scully knew how old money worked. He trusted the bloke who had sent the rental contracts his way, so he was sure that it would all come right in the end.

I think I was watching The World's Most Amazing Hotels or something. And there are multiple scenes in that show where luxurious, top-notch, creme de la creme hotels are basically dealing with Saudi princes who do not pay. And at the end, they're just trying to leave and they're like, no, no, no, no, you need to pay, you have to pay. And they're just like, it way? Why? Why? That was my Saudi accent. Great. And yeah, they're just like, why? What? Someone will deal with this at some point. Obviously, we have the money. You just see these like terrified looking people working in the hotel, like, can I just let this man walk out? There is so much money on his bill. And that is an attitude that is central to this story.

Got it. Glad I have the context and the accents. So yeah, our perhaps slightly naive landlord Andrew Scully did have a few queries though that he couldn't quite shake. If the family were of noble stock, why did the patriarch, Charles Henry, scrub around in the dirt all day for the Oxford garden company? Why did Francois sweep the floors of a Burger King? And why did Christine work in a shop kitchen? And above all, why did Diane de Vedrio work at a Nando's? One of the articles, which we will highlight much later on, but one of the articles about this case is in Vanity Fair, which is an American publication.

They don't know what a Nando's is? No. Do Americans still not know what a Nando's is? No. The journalist is like, she worked in a restaurant called Nando's. It's not a restaurant. It's barely a shopfront. Honestly, if we ever make it on TopJour and they ask me what the worst restaurant in London is, I'm going to say Nando's. No, you can't say that. I don't see the fucking point of it.

The point of it is, if you want to just get some chicken and some sort of carb and refillable sodas before you go to the cinema, that is the only situation in which a Nando's is acceptable to me. I'm not a Nando's hater. I'm really not. If TopDraw, if we ever get on TopDraw and they ask me what the most overrated restaurant in London is, I'm going to have to say it's Duck and Waffle. Okay, that's fair enough. But I never want chicken that isn't fried chicken. I don't understand the grilled chicken thing. I just don't give a shit. I don't mind. I don't mind. What's your Nando's order if you do go to a Nando's? I don't know because I refuse.

Oh, okay. Well, it's less fun if I tell you right now. So roundly shot me down. I'll tell you anyway. Fine, sorry. Go on. It is, of course, a quarter chicken, grilled quarter chicken, extra hot with the matcha peas and the spicy rice and a massive cup that I can just keep refilling with Coke Zero because I'm trash. I'd just rather go to McDonald's to be honest. See, I would always pick Nando's over McDonald's. No.

Fair. That's where we stand. We're breaking up. It's over. So yes, Diane is working in Nando's and landlord Andrew Scully is concerned by this. And these are all very fair questions that Mr Scully has. And somehow, some way, very unusually for us at Red Handed, this time, we actually have all the answers to why this is all going on. Every single one. Mm-hmm.

But be warned, how the de Vegean family ended up cleaning kitchens in Oxford will still absolutely explode your brains. First off, and this is very important, Andrew Scully was not misinformed. The De Vedreans were aristocrats, and in ten years, their landed gentry world had unraveled, leaving them without a penny. In Nando's, in Oxford. And it was all the fault of the Freemasons, kind of. So come with us on their journey. From things being pretty good to things becoming very, very bad. You're going to need your damn brown spectacles and

a bit of kindness towards the upper classes. If you can manage it. Mental poshos. That's what the episode is called. The Davidriar. Maybe. Mental poshos. They. Mental poshers. They are mental poshers. However, as we highlighted in our Jonestown series, manipulation can break anyone if it is carried out the correct way over a long enough amount of time.

Having said that, there are plenty of people who don't class these erstwhile aristocrats as victims at all, except of their own naivety. Yeah, we've been here before. Maybe sometimes I'm right-handed, though the immediate episode isn't leaping to mind. But of course, our very successful limited series Filthy Ritual, which was all about of course, Juliette de Souza, the woman who pretended to be a shaman and conned all these people in Hampstead, a very affluent part of London. This is a path well trodden for you and I, Hannah. And I'm glad to be back here. I love a mental posho. And we've got him in droves. And we also have the Masons, latex masks, enormous family arguments,

deception, deceit, lies, multiple descents into madness, and then, probably more lies. How much you believe is up to you. To get started, to understand, or at least paint a picture of the type of person we are dealing with, imagine the most old money person you have ever met. They have never wanted for anything, but they will still send you a Monzo request for £4.75. I don't know anyone who's really old money. I don't really know anyone who's that rich, but I will say I did once go on a date with a man who was clearly very old money. He's a very nice chap,

very nice chap. A guy who should be called a chap, really. But everything he was saying I was just like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I have literally not a clue what you're talking about. I saw a comedian, and again I can't remember their name because I'm a bad person, who said you know I thought I grew up pretty middle class, pretty run-of-the-mill. And then I found a Facebook status I wrote in 2006 that said I can't remember what it's like to walk without ski boots on. Oh my god. No, mine was the opposite experience where like, I definitely just, I grew up in

a very normal household. I went to like a pretty fucking shitty school. But I thought, you know, yeah, like we were very comfortable. We were very normal. My dad had grown up with literally no money, so he had always wanted us to like have a better experience, but he refused to pay for education, which I'm like, why? But then I went to university and I went to the rarest, one of the rarest. It's not as rare as Loughborough. No it's not. Or as like Exeter or as like Oxbridge. But University of Birmingham is a very rare university and I did a very raw course because I did economics. And I met these people and I was like, sorry, what? What's happening? Who are you? Just

so much. The big, big, big hair, the big bun, the big bun hair, the Ugg boots, the Paul's boutique bags, the Jack Wills jumpers, men turning up to lectures wearing full cricket gear. It was a whole thing. It was a whole fucking thing. So, imagine the most old money person you have even tangentially come into contact with, then make them French, and then double it. Uh oh. That is how posh the de Vittarino family are. I can't cope.

The most important thing I can impart to you to help you understand the family we're journeying with to utter destruction is that when you are wealthy, like really wealthy, and you've never lived paycheck to paycheck, you have never been scared that you won't be able to pay your rent.

If that is your reality, then instant payments, especially returns on investments, are not on your radar. People with big money are very used to long waiting periods for windfall to roll in, which is a fact that can blow them wide open to people who know where they live. And that's exactly what happened to the de Verrien family at the end of the 2000s. And it was a long time coming. The building blocks of the ultimate familial downfall were laid over at least one decade, probably two. What if everything we thought we knew about justice was wrong?

In This Is Actually Happening's new series, A World Beyond Revenge, we explore a radical idea that justice can be about healing, not just punishment. Through five powerful stories, we meet people who've experienced unimaginable harm, and those who caused it, as they come together to seek something radical. Healing. From a man tortured for a crime he didn't commit, to a woman who misidentified her attacker. These stories will change the way you think about justice, forgiveness, and the possibility of a better world. Follow This Is Actually Happening on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to This Is Actually Happening ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.

It takes one guy out there to say, who's that f***ing Kyle who thinks he can just get on a f***ing microphone on a podcast and start publicizing this. From iHeart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV comes a new true crime podcast, Crook County. I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old. Meet Kenny, an enforcer for the legendary Chicago outfit. And that was my mission, to snuff the f*** life out of this guy. He lived a secret double life as a firefighter paramedic for the Chicago Fire Department. I had a wife and I had two children. Nobody knew anything.

People are dying. Is he doing this every night? Torn between two worlds. I'm covering up murders that these cops are doing. He was a freaking crazy man. We don't know who he is, really. He is my father. And I had no idea about any of this until now. Welcome to Crook County, available now.

Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The author of our primary source material, We Were Not Armed, The Families Whose Lives Were Stolen by a Con Man, is none other than Christine de Védrian herself, the woman who ended up working in a shop kitchen in Oxford. She married into the doomed family tree in her 20s. Christine did not have humble beginnings. Her maiden name survived the guillotine and was well known in France.

I'm as sympathetic to Christine as I can. And she does not claim to have this rags to riches like married well story. She's very honest about the fact that, you know, she's not, she hasn't come from the slums. She's fine on her own. Yeah. She's't come from the slums. She's fine on her own. Yeah. Yeah. She's like riches to richest. Yes, riches to richer. Yeah. Riches to Richie Rich. So Christine met her future husband, Richie Rich, Charles Henry, the owner of the equally recognizable name Deveegion in 1969. It took the two of them a while of kicking around in the same circles to get

together. But Charles Henry, the second geomantic, and Christine, the archivist, eventually became an item. Now it wasn't the easiest of unions. France is proudly secular now, but the Holy Spirits of the past still stalk many an ancestral home. Charles Henry was a Protestant and Christine was a Krabi Catholic. Old money takes mixed marriages very hard, but everyone got over it before they tied the knot in the scenic province of Lot de Garonne in 1975.

South-East of Bordeaux a bit, Lot de Garonne was the home of Charles Henry's mum, who's called Guillaumette. Everyone calls her mummy, which is easier for us to say, so that's what we're going to run with. And mummy had much more material wealth than Christine's parents did. We don't have to say, mommy, that often, don't worry about it. Because it's easier to say, but it's more horrible to say. Well, you might have to say it twice. Yes, the De Veltrian were richer than Christine's family, but it wasn't too much of a problem

because Christine had just too many trust funds to let that worry her. She and her new Protestant husband moved into a house owned by the de Veltrian family just down the road from her new mother-in-law. After their honeymoon, Christine continued to work as Charles Henry studied to be a fully fledged doctor. And then, in 1977, the couple had their first son. And his name is my most hated French name, Guillaume. It is. It's a wet name, isn't it? It's just my mouth doesn't like it. My mouth is not built for words like that. No.

And after he was born, Charles Henry needed to complete his degree by doing some voluntary service, and he chose Tunisia to be his post-colonial beat. So he, Christine, and their new baby lived in Tunisia for two years. And when Charles-Henry's time was up, Christine was all too happy to return to Bordeaux and her little house on the Wineland's prairie. The, for now, happy couple had two more children back in France, Omri in 1980 and Diane five years later. While Christine was busy with her brood, Charles Henry set up his own obstetrics and gynaecology practice in the city.

Christine's parents didn't live to see their grandchildren grow up, but Charles Henry's parents did, and they all spent a lot of time together in Bordeaux. A fact that Charles-Henri's siblings were not exactly thrilled with. Because yes, there are a lot more De Vendrian relatives to come. I have left as many as I can out, but you need these to make it make sense. Yeah. So let's get started. Charles Henry was one of four children. First, there was Anne, who died in 1997. Second was Philippe, a senior executive at Shell. And thirdly came Galane. Boo.

Not Maxwell. Devedriel. But she's tarnished with that name because her would arose by any other name. Still stink of shit. Quite possibly. Yeah. I've never met a good Ghislaine. No. Now their father referred to his children in two different sets. The pre-war pair, Anne and Philippe, and the post-war pair, grumpy Ghislaine and golden boy, Charles Henri. And they all grew up in their ancestral home near the medieval settlement town Montflancroix in the south of France. And this country house, Martel, is the most important character in this story by far.

At least it's not called Mosel. Mosel. Mosel. Mosel. Spell Mosel. Mosel. Mosel. Spelled Mosel. And also Alex spelled. Was it Alex? Alex spelled Alec. Yeah, fuck off. If you don't know what we're talking about, you've not done enough listening on the Murdochs. Yeah, Murdock like Sherlock, not the murder murders.

During the war that raged between the childbearing, whilst her husband was away at the front, Charles Henri's mother managed to keep her birthright from the Germans and raise her children living off the land, which is no easy task because when the Germans occupied France, they would literally go into the big houses and be like, we live here now. So the fact that she managed to hang on to Martel is very impressive. And as legend would have it, she managed it as a part of la resistance. Mami, like any great illusionist, never revealed her wartime endeavours, but she would often say with a twinkle in her eye, I will depart with my secrets. Which isn't some sort of codified

partisan catchphrase of days gone by, I thought it was. But actually the catchphrase of the resistance was Vive Libereau Mori, which means, it's the state motto of New Hampshire, live free or die. Yeah. And I mention this because Mami's revolutionary spirit and how strongly Protestants tend to feel about protesting are both quite important cornerstones of this story. So I choose to believe that Guillemette de Védréon, Mami and Virginia Hall were slipping messages to each other the whole damn war.

But let's leave my Virginia fan fiction on my bedside table where it belongs and get back to the Devadrian family dynamics in the late 90s. Galaine had never been a fan of Christine. She felt like her children weren't afforded the same attention as her brother's kids. And years later, she would tell Christine, you stole my mother from me. Thierry gave her back. Now the Thierry in question was not Ghislaine's husband who swooped in on

a noble steed to rescue her from her intrusive thief of a sister-in-law. No, no, Thierry Tilly would ruin every single one of the De Vedrillon tribe. Thierry Tilly would ruin every single one of the De Vegion tribe from their relatively low station of an IT repairman at a secretarial college. The French press took to calling him a guru, but we think that is really, really pushing it. Yeah. When you Google Thierry Tilly, you'll get all of these like, oh, guru, like blah, blah, blah.

And I think that's because when it comes to con men who manage to get as much money as he eventually does, they immediately think of someone like Juliet de Caesar, who must be promising this supernatural, otherworldly thing that can fix all of your problems. So they call him a group, he doesn't even come close. But we have quite some ground to cover before we can say exactly why that's the case. Ghislaine's sense of injustice and loathing for Christine really solidified in 1992, when her little brother, the youngest of all four, was given Martel by their father.

Now look, the youngest son, inheriting 50 hectares complete with towers and turrets, is going to sting. But Big Daddy de Verdun did claim to have his reasons for choosing Charles Henry. He argued that his youngest son was much more equipped financially and mentally than his elder brother. Double whammy. Philippe, yeah. And he essentially made the argument that managing an estate isn't easy and he just thought Charles Henry would be better at it. And look, I'm just going to say, that is a bold move. If your family has built all this, protected it from the Germans, done all that, yeah,

why is birth order more important than the child that you just look at and think you're going to probably do a better job of this? But going to hurt, going to sting,, gonna stab you in the face. And it gets worse because he also says, and Charles Henry's got Christine, who had been a dab hand. Dad! The old moneylark. Just stop.

Just stop. Just write it in a secret will and then die. Don't explain yourself like this. This is unnecessary. Mentally. Financially. Yeah. And he's got a better wife. Oh, fuck it up.

But Christine had been handling her own family finances with impressive dexterity her whole life. But there, my petit saucisse, lies the even bigger rub. For Grumpy Ghislaine, Catholic Christine managing the money side of things and getting all of the grandparental attention was a medieval drawbridge too far. In reality though, Charles Henry was far from in charge, even after his father died in 1995. Charles Henry still very much existed in a matriarchy. Mamie was firmly at the top of the family tree and over time, Ghislaine pulled more and more strings.

In the late summer haze of 2000, the whole de Védrian family were at Martel, and they discovered that they had run into a spot of financial bother. Fifteen years previously, Mammy had sold one of the properties in their familial portfolio, and it turned out the house was absolutely brimming with structural faults. The purchaser of this literally broken home was suing the De Vedriens for the dud of a building that they'd offloaded onto him. Like most old money, the De Vedriens may have had a strong well-bred name,

but that was their only currency. Liquid assets was not something they had much of at all, which wasn't usually a problem, but in the face of an impending lawsuit that had been brewing for over a decade, cashflow suddenly was quite a large issue. The family's biggest fear was that in order to get themselves out of fiscal hot water, they would have to sell the only thing that mattered. Their 18th century chateau and home, Martel.

As the family members mulled over which orifice they could magically pull a pile of euros out of, Galaine told her relatives that Martel didn't have to go anywhere, because she, Galaine, had a solution. We haven't been particularly kind to Ghislaine thus far, and this is the only time I am going to give her a little bit of wiggle room. Ghislaine de Végean did have a particularly tough go of it. Her first fiancée died died and when she found another one, the marriage ended in a very messy divorce and she had a breakdown after. Soon after that she married bachelor number three who's called Jean whose mental health

was so poor that he couldn't get a job. So that meant that by 2012, Galane was the head of a top secretarial college in Paris with an unwell, unemployed husband and two children. Would I be bitter? Probably. Would I think my little brother, who was already having an easy ride, even though he was absolutely fucking fine and didn't need any help, would it fuck me off when he was given the estate and everything and I already didn't like his wife? Absolutely fucking yes I would. When you were like bitter. Bitter? Bit him too. Him and his wife. And Ghislaine had absolutely no problem with letting Christine know how she felt about her. Once when Christine

and Charles-Henri showed up to Martel, Ghislaine very loudly said, of course he's brought that woman with him, yeah his wife, to the family summer party, yes he has. So now that we have a bit more of a character profile, let's push on. How was Ghislaine, with her litany of problems and unspent anger, going to solve the Martel losing lawsuit problem? Because remember that's what she's offering, that's what she's saying, she's saying she's got a solution. Well apparently Ghislane knew a guy. Back in Paris, Galane had been introduced to a man of many talents, who had helped her with all sorts of things to do with her college that she ran, a secretarial one. He had installed a new computer system, had the whole building redecorated,

and had risen to the rank of her right-hand man in the process. There was nothing that Thierry Tilly couldn't do. Ghislaine spoke about him as if he was sent from heaven. Protestant heaven, obviously. Great news, the de Vedrean family thought. Losing Martel would be accompanied by losing even more face, which in Posh-O-Land is the greatest of all tragedies.

Oh, unimaginable. Mm-hmm. But perhaps alarm bells should have rung when the following phrase passed Ghulain's lips. If you take the first nine steps, he will take the tenth. Which? Uh-huh. the tenth. Which? Don't like that. But also, at this stage, he's just the IT guy.

This is what I'm saying. What has he actually done for her secretarial college? Redecorated it? Whoops! I could do that. What? Like, yeah, she has a lot of faith in this man, Thierry Tilly. Without that much evidence that he is like...

A slam dunker. Mental posho. She doesn't know how to paint a wall. Like, he just screws a door handle on... Who paints this wall? You painted this whole room? Yeah, sticks a shelf up. Oh my god, he's Jesus. So yeah, Ghislaine is saying all this stuff and there were no alarms going off for anybody. Not even a dinner gong. Instead, Charles Henry was sent off to Paris to meet Thierry Tilly, the painter and decorator

IT man hero who could solve every tenth one of your problems. When his train pulled in, Charles Henry was met by a short, serious man who recognized him straight away, which was odd considering they'd never met. During the following dinner date, Thierry Tilly proved to be very knowledgeable about the crosses that Charles Henry had to bear, and he knew a lot about high society in Bordeaux as well. In short, Tilly said just enough to convince Charles Henry that he knew what he was talking about.

It worked like a charm. By cocktail hour, Charles Henry trusted Thierry Tilley totally. Not just with the Martel problem, but he also believed Tilley when he said that the De Vendrian could easily be making more money on their assets that lay scattered around France. See, I thought that Charles Henry was going to be the saviour here, the voice of reason, the sanity behind the crazy pochos. But no. No. I mean, at the end of the day, he is related to Galen. Yes. So it's like there's a spectrum of crazy in the Devedrier and just because Charles

Henry sits towards the less crazy, it's still not necessarily related to reality. No. And how other people might benchmark those things. Armed with his new ray of hope and with Thierry Tilly at his side, Charles Henry resolved to fight for Martel and his ancestral wealth dividends like Martin Luther fought for an anti-cannibalism clause in the Divine Covenant. Thank you. And like his own mother, had fought the Nazis. Probably. Hey man, she kept Martel Nazi-free. It's so impressive.

Somehow. Somehow. Charles Henry chuffed off back to Bordeaux with a plan to save the day. Over the next few weeks, Chaz Henry toed and froed from Paris. Every time he returned to Bordeaux, he told his wife Christine that their investments were all in the wrong places and that their financial advisor was a wanker who didn't know anything. All the while, Ghislaine banged on about how much Thierry Tilly had helped her. And she started to give more and more information away about her saviour. Thierry Tilly was not just in the Old Boys Club. He had worked in the espionage department of the UN. And best of all, he was linked to former members of La Resistance. Which, for reasons that will appear

in my upcoming book, Virginia Hall was the Queen of the World but mainly occupied France, is why Mamie de Védréon was a big fan of Monsieur Tilly straight away. He was speaking her language. That language was later described by Ghislaine's husband as besieged citadel syndrome and it had been long ingrained in the De Védrian lexicon. It's a very simple language to learn. The elites are separate from the shipmunchers and the shipmunchers hate them for it. But that's just the way it is.

The higher you fly the more desperately people want you to crash to the ground. All Thierry Tilly had to do was throw a match into Martel and watch it burn. Into his slimy hands. Slowly, all of the De Vendrian assets were moved into a limited company owned by Thierry Tilly. This is just sick. Everyone at Martel was convinced that Tilly would move all of their money around for them, vanish all of the nastiness, and make them even more money. No one asked why a former super spy, who knew

everyone and everything, would want to help a bunch of mental poshos like them. Yeah. Again, in the circles that the de Vaudrillon family move in, it is not rare for you to just meet a guy at dinner and he's like, oh, I can fix that for you. And then he does. Just too much. Just too much. And yeah, look, the only person who had a bad feeling about any of this was of course Christine. She knew something was wrong. But the problem was, it was already too late. There are people that say of Christine that they don't believe that she was always saying that something

was wrong and being ignored. I don't know how much I believe that right from the gate she was sticking her hand up and saying, I think there's something wrong here. I don't know, but I wouldn't be totally surprised if she was just as swept up as the rest of them in the beginning. The following summer, Thierry Tilly and his fashion model wife flounced into Martel for the first time. They were both smart-looking and seemingly sophisticated, and Tilly had a knuckle-cracking handshake, which is what a show of dominance. Oh, always. The Tillys had come from Paris to Martel in person to collect checks and documentation for all of the De Vendré a Euros Thierry was holding.

During this visit, Christine plucked up the bollocks to ask Tilly for a little bit more information on his financial plan, to which he replied. This is not a direct translation because the book is originally in French and I think the translation is a bit clunky. So this is a reimagining, but basically the same. Listen Christine, no one talks about trust to me. Either you trust me or you don't. None of the people I work with ask themselves questions of that sort. They believe in me. I won't tolerate doubts about me being raised. It's a question of quality of work.

Okay, I'm convinced. Yeah. Maybe it sounds more convincing in French. I don't think it necessarily does. I think Thierry Tilly already knows Christine is the like, the one on the inside who's going to cause trouble. Even if she doesn't know that yet, he's already targeted her as the one who's going to cause him the most bother. As a good con man should. Exactly. And she told her husband what he said,, and he just said, oh don't worry about

it. And Ghislaine always shrugged off anything Christine had to say. So Christine dropped it and hoped that everything would just work out. And I'm sure as well that the more Christine, if she had questioned it, Ghislaine would have only dug her heels in harder? Absolutely. And that is scary. Like if you've married into this family, none of them fucking like you.

Your sister-in-law makes your life a living hell, actively hates you and your children. I can understand why standing up to her about family money that she absolutely thinks is none of your business anyway, I can understand why you would be scared to do that. And Chieri Tilley knows that as well. The rest of the family did seem completely convinced that everything would be fine. And she loves her husband, she believes him, she doesn't want to rock the boat. So

Christine just tried to make herself believe it as well. Soon after this royal visit to Martel, the De Vedrean clan encountered a run of bad luck. To this day Christine is certain that this was just a coincidence. But we've spent enough time in the brain of a cult leader to think that she's probably wrong about that. Con man to cult leader might seem like a big jump, but stick with us for a minute. I think we have foreshadowed enough for you to realise that Thierry Tilly is but a common con man. But the techniques he used to control the De Védrian are straight out of the cult leader instruction manual.

By the time he showed up to Martel in person, Tilly had already completed phase one of cult creation, convincing his victims that he was hot shit. With that out of the way, he began phase two, proving to the de Védrian that everyone except him was out to get them, and he achieved that by orchestrating a string of ill omens. The downturn of fate began with a series of vehicle thefts, followed by Christine's newly serviced car catching fire out of nowhere on the motorway. Then two cows died because they had ingested barbed wire, which

is not normal cow behaviour by anybody's standards. Yeah, never heard of that. A farm trailer was stolen and a load of seed went missing from the family's grain store. The missing trailer magically reappeared after a few days, and Tilly sent reimbursement for the exact value of the thieved grain, even though no one told him that it had been taken. Tilly never expressly disclosed to the terrified family who was out to get them. But in his daily telephone calls to Charles Henry and Ghislaine, he often spoke about how much power the Freemasons wielded in the south of France. That's what we're going with, the

Freemasons. For now. Sure. Why not? Why the hell not? So once the paranoia within Martel was at fever pitch, Thierry Tilly began the phase that would take him the longest to achieve. To divide the de Védrian household from within. And he started, of course, with the already established outsider, Christine. And she's ripe for the pick and she really is. Yeah. After all, Galane had done most of the work for him already. And so Tilly ran with it.

He convinced Charles Henry, who is, remember, a medical doctor, that his wife was depressed. And Christine was whacked on transzine in no time. And listen, transzine is a serious business benzo. It can be a very effective drug, but like anything that actually works, it comes with a price. Transzine side effects include bladder issues, shaking, slurred speech and poor balance.

So with all that to contend with, Christine was less believable than ever. And Tieri Tilli was only just getting started. Although some cracks in the scheme were starting to show. One November day Charles-Henri got a call from an old friend. This friend had a daughter enrolled in Ghislaine's college, and he was worried. Apparently the school building had fallen into disrepair. The heating hadn't been turned on for months. And that was strange even to Charles-Henri, because he knew that both his mother and Ghislaine had been sending money to the college in Paris for quite some time. But Charles Henry shook off the nagging voice of doubt and decided this must be a temporary collegiate complication and

he put it to the back of his mind. He had bigger fish to fry. The most pressing sea creature being his youngest son, Henry, who was fucking about at university. He was missing class, smoking weed, very normal trustafarian stuff. But Charles Omri was not having any of it. It was decided that Omri needed to be forcibly shepherded back onto the strait and narrow, and naturally, Thierry Tilly knew how to make that happen. He's like a fucking shit French Rasputin.

Yes. Yes, exactly. And Omri, instead of being a hemophiliac, is just like a shithouse kid. And Rasputin never really wanted any money, he just wanted to fuck bitches and drink Madeira. Oh, God. So, Omri was sent to the very legit Oxford International School of English. Money was transferred to Tilly to make this all happen. Charles Omri could have very easily done this himself, but he didn't. This is what I mean about Charles Omri versus Christine, right? He's a doctor and he doesn't even like discuss with his wife that banging her on a mega benzo

might not be the first port of call because she's feeling a bit anxious. Yeah. Yeah. Straight away, fine. And then Tillie's like, oh, your shithouse son, I'll sort it. The Oxford International School of English is very legitimate. He absolutely could have rung them himself, but he just doesn't. Yeah. It's just like this guy comes into your life and is like, you're too rich and powerful

and busy to deal with this. Your son's a fucking prick. I'll deal with it. I'm your fixer. Don't worry about it." And just to like put this into perspective for you, Christine was not even allowed her son Omri's contact details. She doesn't know where he is. She doesn't know his number. Tilly's like, oh, I've just put him in a homestay. I put him up with some people I know. Yeah. And why? Why is this happening? Well, Tilly told Christine that if she were to contact her son, it would ruin his English language immersion because she'd be talking to him

in dirty old French. And that to save her son, to really save her son, which, you know, if you are a parent and you have a wayward child, you would give anything for that child to get back on the straight and narrow, Tillie told her you need to butt out. But her son wasn't the only person Christine was cut off from. Walled up in Martel and doped up to the eyeballs, Christine was not allowed to answer the phone, and started to suspect that her post was also being tampered with. But once again any concerns that she may have tried to raise were dismissed as the ramblings of a depressed woman, even by her own husband. Christine was right though.

Galaine made it her mission to block any contact with or from the outside world. There's one occasion where Christine's sister is trying to get in touch with her, and she can't get hold of her for weeks and weeks and weeks. So the police show up to Martel on Christmas Day. And then Ghislaine's like, you see? You see? She's bringing the police into my house. And so it just all builds into Christine being this complete pariah. Cult klaxon, please. And before we move on, a pause to direct your attention elsewhere slightly. If you haven't seen the Super Bowl halftime show yet, what the fuck are you doing? But you can go over

to patreon.com slash red handed and listen to our Under the Duvet episode where I tell you literally everything you need to know. And Stan Kendrick, some might say too hard, but I don't think so. You can also watch it guys. We create so much extra content that we sometimes realize we don't tell you all about it. So if you do go over to Patreon and you become a Patreon or you just want to purchase individual episodes, you can totally do that. You can listen to us also do a very uneducated deep dive into the Drake Kendrick lawsuit, which we also did.

Speak for yourself. Check it out. It's interesting stuff. At least we're interested in it. And if you do become a patron or you don't and you just want to, you know, buy individual bonus content episodes that we put up there, you can totally do that because we release a brand new full episode of Red Handed over on Patreon every single month. And this month or last month, some month recently, we did a full on episode on the Waggit the Christie scandal. And it's very good. It is. If you don't know what we're talking about, then maybe you're not interested, but it is interesting. It's all about footballers, wives, ending up in court, fighting it out, duking it out over leaked basements, leaking basements, et cetera. It's better than I'm

making it sound. Go check it out. Wag at the Christie. You will not regret it. Behind the closed doors of government offices and military compounds, there are hidden stories you will not regret it. Unredacted, declassified mysteries, we pull back the curtain on these hidden histories. 100% true and verifiable stories that expose the shadowy underbelly of power. Consider Operation Paperclip, where former Nazi scientists were brought to America after World War II, not as prisoners, but as assets to advance U.S. intelligence during the Cold War. These aren't just old conspiracy theories. They're thoroughly investigated accounts that reveal the uncomfortable truths still shaping our world today. The stories are real. The secrets are shocking. Follow Redacted, declassified mysteries on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Redacted early and ad free right

now on Wondery+. In the 1980s, a rose swept the country. Hey Mike, I really like this white Zinfandel. Well good, good. Now put it down, I'm gonna try another one. White Zin became America's top selling wine. But most don't know that this sweet drink has a sour history.

What began in 1986 with counterfeit bottles. A big fraud, a multi-million dollar fraud. Sent investigators chasing one of the most powerful families in the business. The Lachartes. But the closer the feds got to them, the more dangerous things became. It's a story of deceit. At the time I was paranoid. Threats.

You touch my kids, I will kill you. And murder. With a.22 caliber bullet to the head. What started with a scheme to mislabel wine spilled into a blood soaked battle for succession. Welcome to Blood Vines. You can binge listen to Blood Vines exclusively and ad free on Wondery Plus.

Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple podcasts or Spotify. Plus in the Wondery app, Apple podcasts or Spotify. In time, everyone in Martel started to feel like they were being watched, not just Christine. Christine had been monitored by Ghislaine for years. She was used to it, it was old news. But she witnessed a concerning shift in the other women at Martel, too. Ghislaine and Mommy started to leave the house less and less, and Christine wasn't allowed out at all. When Mommy's cataracts got too bad for her to see, she and Ghislaine became convinced

that it was because their enemies, who they still haven't decided who they are, were shooting lasers into the house. So they took to keeping the shutters closed at all times and never sitting in the garden. Any attempt, Christine, who has now reduced a chateau cook and cleaner made to escape, was blocked, sometimes literally, by Ghislaine in her car. It turned out that Ghislaine's college wasn't the only place that the De Vendriens were misplacing their money. Unknown to Christine, Charles Henry had been funneling money out of his medical practice to Tilly's company. These payments that were sometimes in the quadruple digits all had weird references, like reorganization of the progression and establishment of a company for the reprocessing

of medical waste. The autumn of 2001 brought yet more strangeness. Galane stormed into Martel wearing a cocktail dress in the middle of the day. She was holding a gardening glove and a small bouquet of flowers that she threw in her husband's Galaine stormed into Martel wearing a cocktail dress in the middle of the day. She was holding a gardening glove and a small bouquet of flowers that she threw in her husband's face, screaming, here it is, all the proof you needed for your vile machinations. I found it in our garden. You have 40 mistresses. You are a monster.

The Martel residents, including Galaine's own brothers, looked baffled. Nobody had a single scooby what was going on. And this corsage confrontation escalated into a three-hour screaming match. In the end, Jean left for Paris, filed for divorce, and never returned to the hallowed halls of Chateau Martel. It is later revealed, because that's bizarre, right? Even if you do discover that your husband's having a feather. It's a very bizarre way to handle it. Why is she wearing a cocktail dress? Because Thierry Tilly told her to. There's an email exchange where he's word for word.

He's like, you go in there in the middle of the day, you're wearing a cocktail dress, you have a gardening glove and you have this specific bouquet of flowers and you throw it at him and then you tell him that you know about his mistresses blah blah blah and then he will leave and he does. Is it like the Diana revenge dress? Maybe. I think I, he's very good at just offsetting the balance. So I think what he was trying to do is create this very strange scene that everyone's like, what the fuck? So they're focused on how weird it is rather than the outcome, which is that her husband

is gone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And maybe for Ghislaine, it's also an element of like, you know when they say like, obviously placebos work, but the more complicated the steps are in a placebo, the more effective it is. So if somebody just like take the sugar pill, but I'm not telling it's a sugar pill, but actually placebos work even when you tell people that placebos take this pill, or if they're like, you've got to boil this, you've got to melt this down, you've got to mix this all together and it will achieve this, people have even more faith in it. So maybe there's an element of that. I think that's a really good point. A few short months later, the de Vedrian family

failed to declare any tax liability to the state of France. Oh no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. A decision entirely based on Thierry Tilly's favourite catchphrase, paying doesn't solve everything. Yes, it does. Oh my god. No, no, no. Everyone was listening because no one seemed to be paying anything at all. Charles Henry had to close his obgyn practice because he was

suffocating under a mountain of debt. But we spent enough time in the nooks and crannies. Let's zoom out for a second. The De Vagrin family were lords of the manor, and when the lords of the manor stopped leaving the house, the serfs start to notice. An article was published in the local paper entitled The Montflaquon Recluses. The family responded with a violation of privacy complaint, which did keep local questions at bay for a while, but not forever. You can understand, can't you, being like, what the fuck are they doing up there? They've been there for hundreds

of years, this family, and suddenly they just stopped coming out of the house. Yeah, alarm bells. At least one. And they couldn't escape the questions. When Martel's harvest was seized by the gendarmes for the first time in the estate's history. An acute humiliation. And the talk of the town. The De Vendrayans were truly in too deep. Loans against loans, no capital, credit in the bin, death and taxes looming. And then bailiffs came and they took every piece of furniture the family owned. But still, the inner circle remained convinced that this was all temporary and would soon be resolved. The family even had to move out of Martel and into a smaller building, where Charles-Henri

and Christine slept in a children's bedroom on twin mattresses on the floor. And in this house, no clocks were allowed. So, just to be clear. Mm. Thierry Tilly isn't living with them. No. This is even more bonkers for this sort of manipulation, this sort of cult formation, for the guys doing it to not even physically be there. And he's able to exert this level of control over them. But if he's there, they would be able to observe that he's just a guy.

The less time they spend with him, from his point of view, the better. That's why it's all over the phone. He barely has any time for Christine, who's the one who's suffering the most. So he just becomes kind of like a David Berg thing, where he just has the head of a lion. Yeah, yeah. He's just like a work from home cult leader. I demand flexi-working. Sponsored by COVID-19. You can now run a cult from the comfort of your own home.

Oh my god. So now there was literally no money. Not enough to eat, not enough to buy the basic essentials. The family's hair and teeth started falling out. That's how bad this is. I feel sick. Why are we even here again? What was the problem? They needed something painting. I've completely, I was like, why did this happen? Well it starts off with them being worried that they're going to have to sell Martel.

And then it all just becomes any way to stop that from happening. And they're being dangled this carrot by ATIERI T. He'd be like, you do nine, I'll do the tenth. He did a number on you, all right? It might be tenth. And as we saw in Jonestown, the worse things get, the hungrier you get, the more your teeth fall out, the bolder you get, the more compliable you are. Of course. And there's also the sunk cost fallacy, right? We've trusted this man up until this point. And yes, things have only gotten worse. But we've put so much time and effort into this, we better keep going.

And I don't know how to put a shelf up. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And T. Harry Tilly, through his ventriloquist dummy Ghislaineaine kept chipping away at Christine's ego. This is where it gets really malicious and nasty. Christine was accused of stealing, having affairs, being on the brink of suicide at any point. And it's not just Ghislaine at this point, it's mommy's doing it, Ghislaine's daughters are doing it, it's all angles. And all of the things she was being accused of are just different ways of saying that she can't be trusted. Until August 2005, when all of the children, except Christine's eldest son Guillaume, who

had been banished to Oxford years ago, came home unannounced. Over the years, Christine had been assured that her kids were all in different educational institutions in various countries. But as she now looked at her haggard brood, Christine knew in her heart that was not true. What had really happened is that Diane and Omri had ended up in London, sharing a flat with Ghislaine's children. With no money to pay rent, they'd all been evicted. Tilly had not given the children any money ever, big surprise. But even worse, Omri had been inducted into Thierry Tilley's latest outlet, the Blue Light Foundation.

This was another shell company that he had convinced Charles Henry to invest in, giving a vague explanation of building hospitals in China or something. Omri had been living in offices owned by the foundation on Regent Street. Or so he thought. He was actually locked in a room with only a notebook and a few satanic horror DVDs for company and ordered not to make a sound. After nine months when Omri's burrow was exposed by the actual owners of the building, he moved in with his sister Diane and his cousins. Omri wasn't allowed in the actual flat though. He was forced to

sleep in the entrance hall. His sister Diane did not help him and she never seemed to have taken any responsibility for that as far as we can see. It's very clear that something sinister happened to Diane in London. It really has. She has a chapter in the book that she wrote herself. At literally no point does she even discuss what she did to her brother. She's completely taken in by Ghislaine's children and they don't have any money either. They're going to the supermarket at the end of the day to get the discount stuff, but they're all working till he's taking all of their money and She doesn't even clock that her brother has been treated so poorly and Christine also says that like yeah when Diane came back she would say really weird things like oh

Well, I was really spoiled as a child and I always had the best toys and blah blah blah And she was like there's ten years betweenislaine's children and Diane. They didn't grow up together. There was never a situation where they would have been playing together. So it's just clearly this like thrice removed narrative that Diane believed. Nevertheless, Christine de Vendrien was happy to have two of her children under the same cramped, clockless roof. But it wouldn't last. Later that month, it was Charles Henry and Christine's turn to be banished to Britain. Ghislaine announced that Thierry Tilly was expecting them in Oxford. This time he particularly wanted to see Christine, so

they could discuss the Devadrian investment portfolio. This was odd. Tilly had never expressed a positive interest in Christine ever. Could this be the tenth step, she thought. Was it all about to be over had the end finally come? No. But living in hope, she and her husband went to Oxford where Thierry Tilly and their eldest son Guillaume were waiting for them. Guillaume's become kind of like a Thierry Tilly protege, which is what he tried to do with Armory by breaking him down and making him live in a toilet and making him watch the same horror DVDs over and over again.

But the rug got pulled under him when they all got evicted. So Tilly showed the couple to a small house, opposite his own. It was totally unfurnished and the kitchen was unusable. But they stayed in that house for two weeks before Thierry Tilly decided to drop the bomb. He took Christine for a walk in his garden and told her, Well now, I must tell you first of all about the transmission. And this monomie is where the shit truly gets fucked up and a lot less vague. Mm-hmm. He's done a very good job of this like nebulous enemy, right? But now he gets

down to specifics. The plot solidifies. Christine, like us, had absolutely no idea what Tilly was going on about. So she waited for him to elaborate. And his explanation went like this. There exists in France a few very ancient families who are guardians of treasure entrusted to them over the centuries by Kings Dan Brown. Is this you? So that they may come to the aid of the most impoverished and guarantee a certain equilibrium. These families pass on the secret from generation to generation. Yours, in other words, possesses considerable hidden riches.

You must certainly have some knowledge of it. The place and the way to retrieve it must have been given to you." After a few moments of stunned silence passed, Christine said, while they were all thinking. Tilly's story was total utter bollocks. Her family didn't have any secret treasure hidden away. She had never heard of anything so ridiculous. Thierry Tilly assured Christine that she couldn't be more wrong.

She definitely did have the secret key to uncover untold riches and restore the world to equilibrium. She just didn't know it, because she'd been so traumatized by the weight of the knowledge that her brain had deleted the transmission code. But it was alright, because Tilly was going to help her remember. Oh, thank God. He and his boss, that is. A mystery man called Jacques Gonzales. Stop it. Can't. Shaw-Gonzalez had done this all before, many times.

And when they returned to Tilly's kitchen, Charles Henry confirmed everything that had been said. Not only was the future of the world locked somewhere in Christine's mind hole, worse than that, Charles Henry was convinced that the enemies of his family knew about the secret, and they would annihilate anyone who stood in their way to get it. Namely, Guillaume, because he was the heir to the secret and therefore the one at highest risk. Thierry Tilly made it very clear that they would kill Christine's son if they were given the slightest chance. My eyes hurt from rolling my eyes around. Yes, but what he's done here and something that he builds on over the next few weeks,

because this has been a slow burn, it's about to get fucking nuts. He's like, oh, you're not trying? You're not going to help? Well, then your son's going to die and that's your fault. Yeah. And when you have nobody backing you, even your husband, that's really hard. And you're also, you've been drugged for years and living in a house with no clocks and sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Yeah, that'll do it.

So, for my money, Thierry Tilly came up with this whole fanciful fairy tale because of Christine's maiden name, Connette de la Minier, which means the transmission of metals. Ding ding ding. She didn't even think of that. No, no, because she's fucking off her head. She's off her tits, yeah. So the secret that Christine had to uncover in her memory palace was an account number belonging to a Belgian bank, where the familial riches had been squirreled away for protection. So Christine and Guillaume were sent off to Brussels, where they went into every bank they could find. Every single time though they were turned

away. There was no account under Christine's name anywhere. When their quest was over and there were no more banks to try, Guillem accused his mum of not trying hard enough to save his life and they returned to Oxford, disillusioned and empty handed. This is three days in Brussels and they've And they've got no money, so they're sleeping in youth hostels. Right? And she's like tail end of middle age. Like she's not a spring chicken, right? And it's humiliating to go into bank after bank after bank and being like, I think I may have an account under my maiden name. Basically, she went to Brussels to a debutante ball when she was 18. And Tilly hears about that and he's like, that's it. It must be in Brussels because that's when

you would have been given the transmission. So yeah, Christine was in complete despair. The collapse of the world order rested on her shoulders. Her son's life was on the line. And she just couldn't do what she was being asked. Her resilience reserves were totally depleted, and Christine started to think that the only way to make it all stop was to kill herself. Perhaps sensing Christine's intention to engage in a permanent solution to a temporary problem, Tilly instigated a new tactic. So began Thierry Tilly's Memory Recovery Workshops, Michelle remembers style. Christine was confined to an unheated bedroom for days on end. Tilly took her ID, her watch, her engagement ring and a necklace because of the fictitious tracking devices hidden

within them. And he does this because it's the same reason he moves them into a house that's just had no one bothered to finish building as if you don't notice them when they're there, but when you don't have those like day-to-day comforts, it really grinds you down. Day after day, Christine was ordered by the tiny tyrant, he is quite small, to write down every inch of her childhood memories and scrutinize them for transmission clues. Christine never found them because they didn't exist. But Thierry Tilly wasn't going to relinquish the perfect scapegoat that he had created. Days turned into weeks, and as Christine's grip on reality disintegrated, Tilly devised a new threat. If Christine couldn't remember the Belgian account number on her own, then Tilly would send her to his boss, the faceless Jacques Gonzales, and his team of cortex-crackers

in a secret dungeon in Paris. Under the streets amongst the catacombs, Christine would be physically interrogated, and when Jacques Gonzalez was done with her, she would be left on the streets to die. Tilly had spoken about the need to restore the world's equilibrium before, when he first started talking about the transmission. But it was only at this point in his torture schedule that he revealed who he really worked for. A secret organization called l'équilibre de monde, which means the equilibrium of the world. Yeah, got it.

Who, he said, were the mortal enemy of the Freemasons? And they answered to just one man, the Grand Master, the Grand Wizard. No. Shotgun's Alice. Of course. Tilly would alternate between these brutal physical threats and words of belief and encouragement. He would make Christine write out the same sentences endlessly in her timeless tomb. And here's one that really stuck with us. She wrote, If I do not do this, I endanger the lives of Guillaume, Omri and Diane. I am a bad mother.

I must be able to look myself in the face. And this little routine, orchestrated by Tilly, continued for four whole months. If you're writing that repeatedly every day, and you don't know what time it is, you're going to start believing it. Then in the spring, Thierry Tilly announced that he had finally solved the transmission problem. He escorted Christine upstairs, where Charles Henry, Philippe, and Ghislaine were already waiting. They had all decided that Christine not only held the key to her maiden family's ancient

riches, she had the passcode to the De Vendrie en Fortune too. And you might be wondering, why, why would she have that? Well, here's the rather batshit explanation they had for this bonkers conclusion. Whilst Charles Henry had been in Tunisia, Christine had seduced her father-in-law, the De Vedrion patriarch, and she had extracted the transmission information from him. With her wily, womanly ways. And Ghislaine is like, and that's why she got Martel. Oh my god.

Okay, got it. After a very heavy silence, Cieri Tilli told his prisoner, Christine, you are not worthy to look your family in the face. And he turned her chair away from everyone else in the room. Christine stayed in that chair for days, brutally interrogated by the family she was trying so hard to protect. Her husband of decades slapped her in the face repeatedly to stop her from falling asleep, while the others incessantly demanded the account numbers that didn't exist. And like anyone put under such immense and intimate pressure, Christine eventually just started saying random numbers.

And when she did, Tieri Tilly would hurry off and check if they matched with any actual existing accounts, which of course they didn't, and then when that happened, he would return in a rage with more violent threats and degradation. And worst of all for me, I think, Christine vividly remembers looking to the top of the stairs and all three of her children are watching. theirs, and all three of her children are watching. It's just so insane. And this is the thing why I think the cult comparison is really interesting. Because when you cover cults, it's, you know, hundreds to thousands of people usually, right? So you don't necessarily get these really small, very detailed accounts of what happens. But because this is like a micro-cult, you

can see it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And of course, we can consider the unimaginable horror that Christine was living through. But I think we should also ponder, why is Thierry Tilly doing this to her? Because he knows that the transmission is a total fantasy because he made it up. So he knew that Christine would never be able to tell anyone what the transmission codes were. So what's the point? Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, if we say, com man, et cetera, he seems quite motivated by money up until this point, right? And any manipulation to achieve that end.

How does this achieve that? You're going to tell us. Oh, well. Glad I let myself into that. Because it was all part of his master plan. After nine days, Tillie announced that there was no point continuing. They just had to sell Martel to settle the family debts, and it was all Christine's

fault for holding out on them. He did have some good news though. El Patron, Jacques Gonzales, would purchase the estate from them and hold it safe within the Blue Light Foundation until the family could buy it back. This is his final swoop. Aha. Christine de Verdure collapsed into unconsciousness. until the family could buy it back. This is his final swoop. Uh-huh. Christine de Verdun collapsed into unconsciousness. She awoke three days later to everyone pretending

that her torment had never happened. All Thierry Tilly has wanted from the very beginning is Martel. Yeah. And now he's got it. So everyone just sort of went back to normal. Christine was even allowed to get a job. And as a result, she managed to scrape back some lust for life. Thierry Tilly took 90% of her pay,

but it was still better than being tied to a chair soaked in her own urine. She started to work for local Oxford celebrity Baron Rupert Puget de Saint-Victor. Baron Bobby, as he is known, is the founder of the Oxford Cheese Company. And I'm sure you've been to his shops. There's a few. And he took Christine on in one of his kitchens, and as his name has probably given away, Baron Bobby is French and mega posh. The pair of them became unlikely amies, and after weeks of building suspicions, Baron Bobby sat Christine down and asked her to tell him what the shit was going on. And Christine told him absolutely

all of it, the whole nine years. And when she was finished, Baron Bobby calmly said, We've got to do something. And the next day they did. The Baron tracked down the phone number for Christine's lifelong friend who's called Maria-Lenne. And Maria-Lenne makes several attempts to find out where Christine is. She tries to get into Martel, many of them over the years. So Christine rings her, and it's the first outside contact that she's had for years. And it turned out that Mary-Ellen had been working away over the water and she'd found a superstar barrister who just so happened to be a specialist in advocating for the victims of brainwashing.

Thank fucking God. Yes, yes. She is the real MVP in my opinion. Sure, sure, sure. And so on the 20th of March 2009, Christine rang barrister Daniel Pitcoin and he told her to get to Bordeaux immediately. When she was there, he said he would fix everything. With hope swooping in now from all angles, Christine resolved to make a break for it. She knew her husband Charles Henry was a lost cause, so she escaped alone. Baron Bobby put Christine straight in a cab headed to St. Pancras.

And when Christine stepped off the Eurostar, her dear friend Marie Ellen, who had never given up on her, was waiting. And together they headed south. Barrister Daniel Pitcoin was the perfect man for the job. When he came across Christine's plight, he was already in the middle of a campaign to codify more effective protection for the brainwashed in-law. As a matter of fact, he was the president of an anti-brainwashing association and an expert in cult deprogramming.

With Bitcoin now in her corner, Christine had filed a complaint against Thierry Tilly in front of a judge before she could blink. And it turned out she wasn't the first. Back in Britain, Tilly already had several convictions, not charges convictions, for money laundering. And the Blue Light Foundation were squarely in HMRC's crosshairs. I don't know how many more times I will have to say this in my life, probably lots. If the taxman can get Capone, he can get you too. Still though, international court cases are tricky and they move very slowly, especially when different law enforcement agencies have

to play nicely with each other. In the meantime, whilst the wheels of justice squeaked into action, Thierry Tilly's phones were tapped and his plan to abscond to Switzerland was uncovered. When he made it to Zurich, the police were awaiting. Antieri Tilli was frog-marched down to Bordeaux to await trial. And on French soil, Tilli was charged with fraud, imprisonment, acts of barbarism, torture, extortion of funds, and abuse of weakness. Which I'm sure we have similar things in British law, but they just seem very French don't they?

Uh huh, uh huh. Abuse of weaknesses. Back on her home turf, Christine never stopped thinking about the family she had left behind. But deep down she knew that she may never get them back. Though she was going to give it her best shot. With Daniel Pitcoin's help, Christine assembled a cult-cracking squad, including a psychologist, a criminologist, and the journalist who had written that article about the recluses in the Big House almost a decade before. And their first stop was Christine's oldest son and Thierry Tilly's protégé, Guillaume. While Christine had been gone, he had taken the stand in all manner of money laundering

and fraud cases in defense of his master. There'd also been an entirely bizarre event that's never been properly explained. Whilst his mother was incapacitated by Thierry Tilly, Guillaume had attempted to take a driving test under the name of big boss Jacques Gonzales, wearing a latex mask. In Croydon. Yeah. When Guillem was rumbled he said, oh my little trick hasn't worked.

He's like 20. Yeah. He's so young. Evidently, Guillem de Vegédrian was in way too deep. That's literally the only thing we need to extract from the whole fucking Croydon driving centre debacle. He's beyond help. Yep. Once he was tracked down, Guillem agreed to meet up with his family in Bordeaux. Which is a win, one down.

A second attempt to extract the remaining Oxford dwelling de Védérion was made the next month. Charles-Henri, Omri, Diane and Mami, who also was living in Oxford by this stage and of course, Ghislaine, met Christine and the deprogramming delegation in a pub. And in that pub, it was agreed that Daniel Pitcoin would defend all of them. Even Ghislaine admitted that she wanted out. And the whole family, with the exception of Mommy who was a bit too old for the journey, returned to France. Meanwhile, Vanity Fair journalist Michael Joseph Gross, author of the wonderful

article, Aristocrats and Demons, decided he was going to find the elusive Chuck Gonzales. He's the one who's like a restaurant called Santa. Yeah. So he got hold of an address and rang the doorbell one Parisian day. And to his astonishment, the apartment door swung open to reveal a gray-haired man in his sixties. A surprised Michael launched into a bunch of questions about the

Thierry Tillis saga, of which of course the man denied all knowledge. He said things like, I don't know him and I do not know the Blue Light Foundation. He did not say anything like, what in the French fuck are you talking about you lunatic, leave me alone, which might make more sense if somebody turned up yelling those sort of questions at you in your house. Yeah. He's just like, I don't know Thierieri Tilli. Like he is so specific in the way he answers, it's already weird. It's already weird that he's in Paris and answering the door to a stranger.

So Jacques Gonzales is not a terribly unusual name in Paris, but it did seem like a weird way to respond. And Michael Gross's journalistic Spidey senses were bang on. Six months later, that very same man was arrested, and from that very same apartment, 34,000 euros were seized, along with some very expensive wine, fancy clothes, even fancier watches, and a BMW with 86,000 euros in the boot. So Jacques Gonzalez is real. He's just not what he was described to be. Three years later, the trial of Thierry Tilly began at the Palace of Justice in Bordeaux.

All of his money laundering and fraud charges were being dealt with in magistrate's court. And that's because the legal team defending the de Vendrion had decided that a jury trial for the fiscal charges was pretty unlikely to play out in the family's favor. Their privilege and their naivety wouldn't make them the most likeable victims to a jury, and the maximum sentence for those charges would only be 10 years anyway, so they just decided to forego, which I understand. But for the allegations of illegal confinement in conjunction with acts of cruelty, Daniel Pitcoin had no choice but to drag Thierry Tilly and his mysterious boss, Jacques Gonzalez, to big boy court.

Thierry Tilly, ever the shapeshifter, gave his testimony in a black Lacoste t-shirt. He looked smart enough, but more like a tryhard pencil pusher than a criminal mastermind. Predictably, he began with a sob story. He told the court that his naval officer father beat him so badly that he was left with a permanent squint and a nervous tick. Which meant he failed to make it into the Navy himself. And then he went on to a long list of qualifications that he had in marketing, counterfeit control,

real estate management, anything you can think of, he's done a degree in it. Why that's relevant? Nobody knows. And he had no evidence at all to back up these accreditations. Oh, and also he told everyone that he was an espionage agent, but refused to engage in any line of questioning surrounding that claim lest he compromise his mission. When he finally stopped talking about himself and got on to the de Vergeriam debacle, he insisted that the whole thing was Jacques Gonzalez's idea, and therefore

it was all his fault. Thierry Tilly's father was next up, and he confirmed that literally everything his son had said was total shit. He has this very long-winded story about how his mum was a championship ice skater, and then she got pregnant so then she could never go to the Olympics. And his dad is like, she never saw a pair of ice skates in her life. Why? Why do people lie about such easily provable things? And also that doesn't even move the story forward. Doesn't matter.

No, exactly. And this did actually make me quite sad. His father says if I had been harder on him, it never would have come to this. So maybe he's like, maybe if I did smack him around, he wouldn't be such a fucking dick. There you go. Episode 15 of our parenting podcast. The second week of hearings saw Jacques Gonzalez roll into the Palace of Justice in a wheelchair. Like Eddie Lee Sexton. Oh yes, I thought I was going to say Harvey Weinstein.

I mean... Did he? Not a wheelchair. He had a stick or something, didn't he? Crutch. And yeah, Jacques Gonzales also denied everything and insisted that the Blue Light Foundation was indeed a legitimate, philanthropic entity that had just not gone quite to plan. He said that he had no idea that Tilley was extorting money from the family and running

it through his Chinese hospital building operation. You know, a lot of money to the tune of 5.5 million euros. An eye-watering amount that Thierry Tilly's defence argued had been surrendered willingly by Charles Henry and his family. Which is quite difficult to prove that they didn't. Yeah. But Gonzales' old see no evil, hear no evil argument fell apart when the judge and jury were presented

with a phone recording in which he said, I've had it up to here with these people. They must cough up the cash. If not, things will turn nasty. Execution. Probably less to the point in French. Yeah. But don't leave phone recordings with all your threats on them. That's how you're going to get caught. The way they tapped his phone. Oh, okay. So wheelchair or not, after that, Jacques Gonzalez had no legs to stand on. When all was said and done, Thierry Tilley was sentenced eight years and Jacques Gonzalez got four. And even after all of that, even after she had said that she wanted Daniel Bitcoin

to defend her, even after she said that she had wanted out, Ghislaine was still convinced that Thierry Tilly knew what he was doing. She told her children that he wasn't guilty, he had his own reasons for accepting the situation and everything would be looked after and would come right in the end. Classic. Look, we've said it before, I'll say it again. The cognitive load of changing your mind about something is very, very high. Yes.

So let this be a lesson to you all. Don't believe anything. It's okay to change your mind. And if you don't change your mind for long enough on many a topic, you will end up with the name Ghislaine. That's what we'll call you. Don't be such a fucking Ghislaine. Don't be such a Ghislaine. Anyway, it appeared that Ghislaine was just too far gone for even Daniel Bitcoin brainwashing extraordinaire to uncultify. I found out while researching this that sort of deprogramming cult members before the 80s was quite violent. And then the way they did it in the States was completely changed by

an ex-Mooney who he left and deprogrammed himself basically. And then he instigated a like decult program where people just got their noses broken less. And that's why it's all changed because of a Mooney. Well there you go, they're the people that get married in those big, big... stadiums. Stadiums. Exactly. As of 2014, Christine and Charles Henry still live in Bordeaux and by now, when you're listening to this in 2025, the year of our Lord, they will be approaching their 50th wedding anniversary.

All of their children completed their educations and went on to prosperous careers. And Christine finished her book with the hopeful words, I entrust the past to mercy, the present to grace, and the future to Providence. Ghislaine also has a book. Never to be outshone by Christine. No, she has been because no publisher has translated it into English. Oh, Ghislaine. It's called Diabolique and... It's about Christine.

It's about Christine. I never managed to get my hands on any sort of translation, because it's not even, the e-book is impossible to get hold of. And I made a decision whilst doing the research that I feel like I know enough about Ghislaine. I know what her reasoning was. I know how she got carried away. I don't need to read a book as well. No, we're good. We're good, Ghislaine. Even though Thierry Tilly did go to prison and so did Jacques Gonzalez, the De Védrion never got Martel back. It was sold long ago. In the end, all the house of De Viserion were left with was their name, which is what got

them into all this trouble in the first place. Oh dear. So I think what we've learned, stay away from Ghislaine's. Please, always. And if the IT guy starts getting a bit uppity and starts talking about the Masons. Sack him. Sack him. And it's okay to change your mind. Yes, you're right. That is the major takeaway. So that's it guys. Go forth.

Change your mind. Yes. Don't meet the lanes. You know what? Change your mind at least once a day just to get your practice in. Exactly. You can change it back. Just keep doing it. Then you've got two for one. Exactly. Keep that brain of yours on its tippy toes. And if anyone named Galane comes a-knocking, knock her down. Yeah. Q, our inbox is being filled with Galane's being like, I'm actually nice. I don't believe you. I never heard the name Galane before Galane Maxwell. I don't believe it. If you are called Galane, I apologize

Also, if you're called Guillem, I apologize for calling you wet. And that's it. We'll see you next week for another Probably hard to pronounce episode Goodbye. Bye He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood walk of. Did he built an empire and live the life most people only dream about. I know a no party like a did he party so yeah. But just as quickly as his empire rose it came crashing

down. Today, I'm announcing the unsealing of a three count indictment charging Sean Combs with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, interstate transportation for prostitution. I was f***ed up. I hit rock bottom. But I made no excuses. I'm disgusted. I'm so sorry. Until you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, it's not real. Now it's real.

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