REPORTERS’ PHOTO PLOY BACKFIRES
Three journalists who donned white doctors’ coats to gain entry to a comatose soap opera star’s hospital room were given suspended four-month jail sentences Thursday.
Unemployed reporter Eric Pachet and trainee journalists Raymond Kakou and Catherine Kondrachoff had planned to take photographs of star Chantal Nobel as she lay in a coma, but they were challenged by a nurse.
Nobel appears in “Chateauvallon,” a French series about a rich newspaper family.
She was injured in a crash in May in a sports car driven by French singing star Sacha Distel. Her family had filed the violation of privacy charges against the three reporters.
The lawyer for the trio said afterwards that they would appeal the sentences, officials said.
Nobel’s lawyer, Gilles Dreyfus, meanwhile told reporters that the actress had asked him to sue the weekly magazine VSD for publishing photographs, taken with a telephoto lens, of her in a wheelchair being transferred from hospital to a nursing home.
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