After being in a relationship for over a year, ‘bruised and defeated’ Jeannette Bougrab will not attend the funeral of her lover Charb – the slain editor of Charlie Hebdo.Her decision comes after an extraordinary intervention by his family who denied the couple had any committed relationship and demanded she ceased speaking about him.
According to Mailonline,Charb’s brother, Laurent, issued the ‘one-off’ statement from the family on Saturday, following a series of emotional interviews given by the former minister of State. Now Miss Bougrab – mother of an adopted three year old daughter May – says:
‘In the morning I was with his parents at the Forensic Institute to see the body of my companion.But now I’ve agreed to remove myself and I will not go to his funeral. I do not have the strength to fight for that. I am bruised and defeated.But they won’t take away my fight for secularism.“The family have deprived me of a last reunion with my love.By doing that they’ve killed him a second time.’Human nature is ugly. We loved each other because we were both independent personalities.We didn’t do a press release to announce our relationship but we weren’t hiding it. He had met my mother, my daughter called him dad.Bougarb, a 41 year old lawyer, quickly became the public face of France’s mourning soon after the killing of 12 people, mainly journalists, at the office of the satirical magazine.
Grief stricken, frequently in tears, she gave a series of emotional television interviews saying she knew he would be killed and describing how she begged him to leave France.
‘ My companion is dead because he drew in a newspaper.’The former French Secretary for Youth and Community Life described to French TV station BMFTV how she got the news he was killed.
‘He never had children because he knew he was going to die. He lived without fear but he knew he would die.’
‘I was at a state meeting and I learned there had been a shooting.
‘Then I sent him a text, a second text, third text, and then I phoned him and he wasn’t answering and he never did that.‘When I got there, there were the cordons and we weren’t allowed to get in and I learned there that he was dead.’
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