Monflanquin, A True Twisted Machiavellian Plot That Swindled A Family’s Château

The modern-day swindling of a 16-century château in Monflanquin and the financial extortion and ruin of an aristocratic family is one of the most unbelievably horrifying, yet psychologically fascinating, albeit tragic stories that I have ever read.

The Védrine family, victims of the whole diabolical affair,  were called the “reclus de Monflanquin” or reclusives of Monflanquin.

It proves once again that sociopathic individuals can have such incredible charismatic charms and ability to lie,  that they can steal your family’s château right from under your eyes.

What I am about to recount seems in some ways way too weird, too suspiciously unreal to be true, even bordering on the wacky.

The twisted sinister plot that stole this château comes across as a fictional fabrication of a very imaginative writer, yet the story is tragically true!

It is also a perfect portrait of the psychiatric diagnosis called a folie en famille, which is actually the plurality of folie a deux, a delusional disorder shared by two or more individuals.

The occurrence of a shared delusional disorder of a whole family is indeed quite rare.

In my own practice, I had a case of folie a deux, where the primary patient had delusions of being persecuted by the FBI, who were killing his cows on his ranch, eventually shared by his mother.

Monflanquin is a small village of about 3000 residents, near Bordeaux.   This beautiful château had been in this aristocratic family for over five centuries.

As I have often mentioned that the real-life miseries often heard in my therapy room, can be stranger and more unbelievable than any fiction writer can concoct.

This whole miserable saga began in 1999.  By 2012, this aristocratic Protestant family had been robbed of close to 5 million euros.

This clan of 11, consisting of three generations of Védrines, were aged from 16 to 89 years of age. The oldest being the matriarch of the family, who died in 2010.

These  socially prominent well educated law-abiding citizens of means, who proved to be very vulnerable under the charms and manipulation of a sociopathic man.

It was indeed a very fateful day when Ghislaine de Vedrine met Thierry Tilly in 1999. It was a chance introduction by a friend at her school for secretaries in Paris.

She hired him as a teacher and he soon made himself indispensable to her in all sorts of ways as a problem solver.

Ghislaine started to confide in him her rather ordinary familial concerns and he was soon introduced to the rest of her family, consisting of her mother, two brothers and their families.

One brother was a well-respected gynecologist in Bordeaux and the other a petroleum executive.

It wasn’t long before Tilly began to infiltrate and indoctrinate each member of the family with his multiple lies.

His malevolent strategy began with infiltrating the family, posing as a heroic figure bent on saving them from a dangerous exterior threat.

Once members were convinced of being persecuted and targeted, he created paranoia amongst the family members by pitting one against the other, to further create divisions and exclude a few family members who had doubts to Tilly’s validity.

He then created a “us against them” mentality to solidify congruent family loyalty from any exterior reality.

Sequestering the Védrine family from all friends and society helped maintain control to further intensify and maintain their delusional convictions.

These malicious acts of psychological manipulation are seen by the way in religious sects and cults and can be used to indoctrinate large groups of people.

The only member of the family that was reluctant to believe him was Ghislaine’s husband Jean, a financial journalist.

Thierry Tilly first ingratiated himself to be within their aristocratic ranks, saying that his ancestors were the Habsbourgs and that he and his family knew Mitterand and other famous notables.

He confided in them that he was a secret agent of  Otan(Nato) and that he had come into their lives to save them from diabolical plot to steal their belongings and to do away with them.

He was able to convince them that it was the Masons and the Rosicrucians who had long targeted their family.

These confabulated lies created immense paranoia even within the family, as Tilly started to pit wives against husbands and vice versa, and others creating jealousies, and doubts.

Ghislaine sent off her husband, Jean, and refused further contact with him after being convinced by Tilly that he had over 40 mistresses and was involved in an evil sect.

Events were used as further evidence that the family was being targeted in order to increase existing paranoia.

Two family member’s cars were stolen, one caught fire, two of their cows died and there was a  break-in of the gynecologist’s office.

At that point Tilly convinced them that they only way to save them was to go into hiding, separating them from the outside world.

Ghislaine left Paris and her brother left his practice in Bordeaux to return to other family members in Monflanquin.

Ghislaine’s newly married daughter left her husband of a few months out of fears of him being a part of the plot.

The family took residence in the château, keeping the shutters closed, grounds surveyed and rarely left.

Letters were returned, telephone calls refused, contacts with friends broken, and even taxes went unpaid.

By 2003, friends and townspeople started to be concerned that they were being trapped by some religious “sect”.

Rare encounters with others in the village, had friends being insulted and accused of being Masons and participating in black masses or having orgies.

Tilly also had them transfer funds from the sale of family apartments in Bordeaux, Paris and the Atlantic coast and jewelry into a nonprofit foundation for “safekeeping”, set up by an accomplice and himself.

By 2006, he had persuaded several family members to move to England where he was living in order to further “protect” them.

During this time these once well-accomplished professionals, including the doctor were all engaged in blue collar work, as a gardener, a cook, and clerks.

Tilly harvested 90% of monies under the umbrella of safeguarding, which he funneled to his account and that of his accomplice.

Family members recounted living in a constant state of fear and paranoia of being molested, kidnapped or being killed.

Christine, the only member of the family that was Catholic, was singled out by Tilly as hiding an inheritance that he commanded her to recuperate and share with the family.

Christine was commanded to go to Brussels and visit each bank in order to find this hidden inheritance, that of course was nonexistent.

When she returned empty handed unable to find monies that never existed, she was confined by Tilly to sit on a stool, doped with medications, forbidden to go to the bathroom until she confided “where she had hidden the money”.

The physical and psychological abuse finally broke Christine into fleeing when Tilly said that her oldest son was a “bastard conceived by her father”.

It was Christine who contacted the police and reported the whole saga of events in 2009.

By this time the family’s château had been sold to Tilly’s nonprofit foundation, who in turn sold it to a real estate developer.

In 2009, the real estate developer then sold the château to a private buyer, who still has it today.

Tilly was arrested in Zurich, Switzerland depositing the extorted funds into his private Swiss bank account.

In 2012, Thierry Tilly was convicted by the French court of fraud, extortion of funds, psychological and physical abuse, with barbaric acts of torture,  and sequestration of the Védrine family.  He is now serving time in prison.

Even at that time, Ghislaine de Védrine, and the majority of family members still believed in Tilly and felt that the Masons and Rosicrucians were behind Tilly’s arrest.

It took a devoted psychiatrist and criminologist, along with intense mental debriding for family members to come to the reality that they had been manipulated, brainwashed and psychologically imprisoned by delusional beliefs for over 9 years.

I suspect that accepting the reality that they were completely financially destroyed and that over 9 years of their life was lived in a delusional paranoid cloud of tortured influence was very difficult.

That reality grounded in the stark truth, along with each of their respective guilt and grief must have been in many ways a more painful blow to swallow and come to grips with than with their past delusions.

Returning to France, they were penniless, living in housing projects and shelters.

The gynecologist has returned to work at a maternal child center and Jean and Ghislaine have been reunited.

Since then the family has gone through the judicial system to try to undo the maze of convoluted swindling that Tilly masterminded.

In 2015, the French court annulled the first bill of sale as being invalid, due to the family’s psychological brainwashing.

Unfortunately, the second bill of sale to the private citizen was upheld as being legally enacted.

The Védrines went back to court again in June 2018, in efforts to have the second bill of sale to the private owner considered invalid as well, but the decision was put off till October 2018.

Of course, the current owner of the château is quite aware of this family’s criminal brainwashing at the hands of Tilly, but has not shown any empathic response to their predicament.

I personally would find it difficult to enjoy living in a château once belonged to a family for over five centuries, that had been stolen from them, while still under the depraved criminal influence of Thierry Tilly.

Given the horrendously tragic history of this family’s extortion of funds and belongings, I hope and pray that this family will have their château in Monflanquin rightfully restored back to their family.