A private November 2022 letter attributed to Brigitte Bardot has been made public, and it sharpens the fight over her estate. In it, she tells Bernard de Chiara he was “patiently destroying me day after day,” turning a family and property dispute into a much uglier record of how the late screen legend saw her longtime companion.
The letter begins with “Bernard, it’s a failure!” and later says she had given him “everything.” Bardot also wrote that she needed “a shoulder, a support, a tenderness, a presence – which you are incapable of giving.”
La Madrague and the will
Bardot died at her home in Saint Tropez, and her will, read last December, divided the estate between the Brigitte Bardot Foundation and Nicolas Charrier. It made no mention of de Chiara, even though he had lived with her for more than 30 years and was still tied to La Madrague until a week before the article, when he was forced to leave the house.
The Foundation has also said Bardot stipulated that La Madrague should be unoccupied within six months of her death. That detail sits at the center of the practical dispute now: the home was not treated as de Chiara’s to keep, and the estate papers appear to have been written that way from the start.
September sale and £835,000
In September, the Brigitte Bardot Foundation organized a sale of household objects mainly taken from Bardot’s Paris flat. It raised nearly €1m, or about £835,000, and the proceeds were shared between the Brigitte Bardot Foundation and Nicolas Charrier. The sale shows how quickly the estate was already being turned into distributable value, not just preserved as memory.
De Chiara said of that sale: “I found it extraordinary that just a few months after Brigitte's death, they already wanted to make a souvenir out of her. I did not appreciate that one bit,” The clash is sharper because the Foundation says he removed items from La Madrague, including Bardot’s Mini Moke jeep, while de Chiara is also reported to have been living in an apartment rented from the town hall of Saint Tropez.
Max Guazzani on the claim
Max Guazzani, the Foundation president, said: “I am not accusing him of theft, but it's gone and that's a problem,” He added: “on a human level one can understand [de Chiara's reluctance to leave La Madrague]. But it's the law and it's also what Brigitte Bardot wanted.”
That is the real hinge now. The letter makes the personal break impossible to soften, while the estate paper trail keeps pointing back to the same result: the Foundation and Nicolas Charrier were named, de Chiara was not, and the next move is a definitive list of Bardot’s assets before anything else can be settled.
