Worlds Largest Breasts

Doing Lolo justice

The death of grossly-proportioned Eurotrash presenter Lolo Ferrari may have been more than a tragic accident or suicide, writes Jon Henley

Thursday November 14, 2002

A court in Aix-en-Provence has decided there is enough evidence to place the husband and manager of Lolo Ferrari, the actress, singer and former Channel 4 presenter best known as the woman with the largest breasts in the world, on trial for her murder.
Eric Vigne, 54, has been in pre-trial detention since February after a report by three police scientists found that Ferrari, who died in March 2000 at the age of 37, could have been suffocated in her sleep at the couple’s home in Grasse in the south of France.
He has always denied any part in her death, pointing out that the former porn star, who under his direction underwent more than 30 different surgical operations to transform her body into that of a cruelly inflated doll, was “the goose that laid my golden eggs”.
Vigne and his lawyers have demanded further tests, insisting on the evidence of an earlier medical report that stated that Ferrari, who had a heavy cold on the night she died, most probably died from a lethal cocktail of antidepressants and other prescription drugs.
But the court has turned down his latest request for release, with investigators noting that Vigne had two possible motives: his sad creation, increasingly reliant on alcohol and uppers to maintain her stability, was bringing in less and less money from the grotesque song and dance shows she performed in nightclubs around Europe.
Lolo Ferrari had also recently taken a lover – reportedly a Monaco policeman – out of spite at the incessant demands Vigne made of her, and had spent several hours with him, earlier on the evening of her death, in a wife-swapping club on the Riviera.
Police have also discovered that Vigne had already recruited two potential Lolo-replacements, sisters whom he dubbed the Silicone Girls, had paid for a series of painful operations to inflate their breasts to absurd proportions, and had launched them on a tour of downmarket clubs in places as far afield as Ukraine.
The latest revelations, while providing no conclusive proof that Vigne did away with his wife, are further evidence of the living nightmare in which Lolo Ferrari found herself trapped in the months before her death.
Born plain Eve Valois in 1963, she had grown up in a middle-class family in the resort town of La Baule. Vigne, whom she met when she was 17, masterminded her transition into absurdly inflated doll – although Ferrari always said she was happy with her ever-changing body because it helped her escape a deeply unhappy childhood.
Her mammoth breasts, designed by an aircraft engineer, were measured by the Guinness Book of Records at 54G. They held three litres of surgical serum each and weighed 6lbs 2oz apiece. She had difficulty breathing, could not sleep on her stomach or back, and was afraid of flying because she thought they might explode.
Her breasts were not the only part of her to be surgically enhanced. She had undergone multiple operations on her lips, cheeks, nose, forehead, eyebrows and stomach: 25 operations in five years. All that made her, for a while, a minor sensation on laddish TV shows including Channel 4’s Eurotrash, where she was a regular co-presenter.
Without meeting her, psychologists have said Lolo probably suffered from a rare condition called dysmorphia – an irrational conviction that one’s body is repulsive. Once an individual has embarked on that path, said a Paris psychiatrist, Francois Chauchot, there is no going back.
“It’s a vicious downward spiral,” he said. “It will never end, because no amount of operations will ever be enough to put the body right. Exterior appearance counts for more than personality; there’s no distance any more. And when one more frustration appears, these people collapse easily.”
Except that it now seems increasingly possible that Lolo Ferrari may not have collapsed entirely of her own accord. A court case in Aix next year will decide precisely what role the Svengali-like Mr Vigne played in the death of a woman who was almost entirely dependent on him financially, emotionally and psychologically – and whose ultimate unhappiness was quite certainly largely of his making.