Brigitte Bardot’s Memoir About Motherhood Sparked Her Son’s Lawsuit

“I’m not made to be a mother,” Brigitte Bardot wrote in her 1995 memoir Initiales B.B., adding that she was “not adult enough… to take care of a child.” She had put it even more bluntly earlier in life: “I am not a mother, nor do I want to be one.” Those sentences — and the decades of fallout that followed — are at the center of the complicated relationship between the French icon, who died on Dec. 28, 2025 at age 91, and her only son, Nicolas-Jacques Charrier.

Bardot gave birth to Nicolas at home in Paris on Jan. 11, 1960, with her then-husband, actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she had eloped. In Initiales B.B., she described her pregnancy in stark terms. “I looked at my flat, slender belly in the mirror like a dear friend upon whom I was about to close a coffin lid,” she wrote, explaining that abortion was illegal in France and that she had previously “sought an abortion” and even punched herself in the stomach in an attempt to end the pregnancy.

Her language about motherhood did not soften after Nicolas was born. At a press conference, she reportedly said she would have “preferred to give birth to a little dog” when asked about him, per The Independent. In Initiales B.B., she also called Nicolas the “object of my misfortune,” and repeated, “I’m not made to be a mother… I’m not adult enough — I know it’s horrible to have to admit that, but I’m not adult enough to take care of a child.”

By the time the memoir was preparing for release in the mid-1990s, Nicolas and his father had already pushed back. They tried to have the 80 pages worth of passages about their family removed before Initiales B.B. went to print, per Irish Times, but the attempts at censorship failed and the most painful sections became the most quoted. In 1997, a Paris court ruled that Bardot and her publisher had invaded their privacy and ordered them to pay about $40,000 in damages — £17,000 to Jacques Charrier and £11,000 to Nicolas — and to carry a notice in future editions flagging the offending pages.

Nicolas had already been living largely outside his mother’s world. After Bardot and Charrier divorced in 1962, he was raised primarily by his paternal grandparents. Bardot later said of that period, “I didn’t bring up Nicolas because I needed support, roots… I couldn’t be Nicolas’ roots because I was completely uprooted, unbalanced, lost in that crazy world.” He eventually settled in Norway with his wife, model Anne-Line Bjerkan, and their children, while Bardot remained in France.

Charrier also answered Initiales B.B. in print. In 1997 he published his own book, My Response to Brigitte Bardot, saying that “By giving my version of the facts, I’m doing her a big favour… In a way, I rehabilitate her. The reality of her love for Nicolas, confirmed by the letters I kept, is much more to her credit than the horrors she wrote,” per Telegraph. Bardot, for her part, continued to say in interviews that she loved her son but had not been able to meet the demands of motherhood when she was at the height of her fame.

Despite the damage created by her own words, there was limited contact later in life. In 1992, Bardot married her fourth husband, businessman Bernard d’Ormale, in Norway, near where Nicolas and his family lived. She later said they visited each other about once a year. In her final years, Bardot publicly acknowledged that talking about Nicolas had become part of the problem. “I promised Nicolas I would never talk about him in my interviews,” she told Paris Match in a 2024 special issue.

The memoir that caused so much pain arrived long after Bardot had already walked away from the film industry. She retired from acting in 1973 at 39, saying she wanted “a way to get out elegantly,” and spent the rest of her life focused on animal-rights work and, later, on far-right politics. But when it came to motherhood, she had already left a written record she could not take back — one her son spent much of his life trying to answer, limit or move beyond.

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