French banker’s lover freed after sex games murder sentence

The mistress of a top French banker who shot her lover dead during a sado-masochistic sex session was freed from prison Wednesday, less than 18 months after being jailed for murder, her lawyer said.

Cecile Brossard was handed an eight-and-a-half year sentence in June 2009 for Edouard Stern’s murder but qualified for early release as she had already served more than four years on remand before her trial.

“She left Riant-Parc (a prison in Geneva) this morning,” the lawyer, Alec Reymond, told AFP.

Brossard had been sentenced after pleading guilty to killing Stern at the beginning of her trial, which exposed lurid details of their relationship and a tale of sex, power and money.

Fifty-year-old Stern, a prominent French financier whose circle of friends included President Nicolas Sarkozy, was shot in his penthouse flat in the western Swiss city during a sex game on February 28, 2005.

His corpse was found the following day, dressed in a full-body latex suit with two bullet holes in his head and another two in his torso.

Brossard, a 40 year-old French citizen, eventually confessed to the killing.

Her defence lawyers argued she was driven by passion and snapped under the pressure of a tormented four-year relationship with Stern, whom they portrayed as a “narcissistic pervert” and deeply manipulative.

Prosecutors and attorneys for Stern’s family had alleged instead that Brossard was “venomous”, cynically motivated by greed and the prospect of a one million dollar payment he had made to her but later froze.