Charlotte Valandrey passed away on Wednesday July 13, 2022 at the age of 53. HIV-positive since she was 18, the actress had just undergone a second heart transplant a month earlier. She had been transplanted for the first time, in 2003, after two heart attacks caused by her treatment against HIV.

On the announcement of his death, Yann Moix paid tribute to the one he considered to be “more than a friend”. “She deserves so much to rest. Death does not deserve it. Everything is flat without you. A great emptiness that eats up my days”, he wrote in the columns of Paris Match dated July 21. The writer then evokes a passionate relationship: “A week later (their meeting, editor’s note), she asked me to marry; already frightened by this sacrament, (…) I refused, panicked. She was amused and persecuted me , I who had loved her almost always, with her keenest attention. She was crying out for love and longing to be consumed by it.”

Words that angered those close to Charlotte Valandrey. The actress’ family spoke on her Instagram account. “No one among the closest is aware of this complicity (…) What we know is a brief rapprochement without a love story when they were young but especially not much since”, could we read in a post, since deleted.

And to add, to the attention of Yann Moix: “When he worked on Saturday evening on television, the columnist never answered calls from Charlotte who needed him.” The authors of the message signed “your family”, and intended to tell “the truth”, continue: “The impostor allows himself to make her speak with words which are so foreign to her. Charlotte has never been for anyone ‘a dying professional’. She embodied precisely the opposite. Shameless fabrication is also limitless.”

Tuesday, July 26, the writer reiterated. “I will not remove a word, a line, a semicolon, a comma from this tribute,” he told Paris Match. Yann Moix assures us: their complicity “was all the more profound, invaluable and precious as it has always been clandestine”.

“I will not apologize for my article, whether it pleases the parents whose pain is infinitely respectable or not,” he insists. Before concluding: “Everyone mourns their Charlotte. They mourn a Charlotte they gave birth to, I mourn a Charlotte who taught me to become a man…”