{"id":2214878,"date":"2025-12-28T19:28:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T19:28:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2214878"},"modified":"2025-12-28T19:28:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-28T19:28:16","slug":"brigitte-bardots-memoir-about-motherhood-sparked-her-sons-lawsuit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/brigitte-bardots-memoir-about-motherhood-sparked-her-sons-lawsuit\/","title":{"rendered":"Brigitte Bardot\u2019s Memoir About Motherhood Sparked Her Son\u2019s Lawsuit"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\t\u201cI\u2019m not made to be a mother,\u201d Brigitte Bardot<\/a> wrote in her 1995 memoir Initiales B.B.<\/em>, adding that she was \u201cnot adult enough\u2026 to take care of a child.\u201d She had put it even more bluntly earlier in life: \u201cI am not a mother, nor do I want to be one.\u201d Those sentences \u2014 and the decades of fallout that followed \u2014 are at the center of the complicated relationship between the French icon, who died on Dec. 28, 2025<\/a> at age 91, and her only son, Nicolas-Jacques Charrier.<\/p>\n

\n\tBardot gave birth to Nicolas at home in Paris on Jan. 11, 1960, with her then-husband, actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she had eloped<\/a>. In Initiales B.B<\/a>.<\/em>, she described her pregnancy in stark terms. \u201cI looked at my flat, slender belly in the mirror like a dear friend upon whom I was about to close a coffin lid,\u201d she wrote, explaining that abortion was illegal in France and that she had previously \u201csought an abortion\u201d and even punched herself in the stomach in an attempt to end the pregnancy.<\/p>\n

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\tRelated story
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\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tWhy Brigitte Bardot Quit Acting at 39: \u2018Get Out Elegantly\u2019\t\t<\/p>\n

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\n\tHer language about motherhood did not soften after Nicolas was born. At a press conference, she reportedly said she would have \u201cpreferred to give birth to a little dog\u201d when asked about him, per The Independent<\/a><\/em>. In Initiales B.B.<\/em>, she also called Nicolas the \u201cobject of my misfortune,\u201d and repeated, \u201cI\u2019m not made to be a mother\u2026 I\u2019m not adult enough \u2014 I know it\u2019s horrible to have to admit that, but I\u2019m not adult enough to take care of a child.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBy 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<\/em>. went to print, per Irish Times<\/a>,<\/em> 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 \u2014 \u00a317,000 to Jacques Charrier and \u00a311,000 to Nicolas \u2014 and to carry a notice in future editions flagging the offending pages.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Brigitte<\/p><\/div><\/div>

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\t\t\t\t\tBrigitte Bardot arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport, 1965.<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFairchild Archive\/Penske Media\/PMC<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tNicolas had already been living largely outside his mother\u2019s world. After Bardot and Charrier divorced in 1962, he was raised primarily by his paternal grandparents. Bardot later said of that period, \u201cI didn\u2019t bring up Nicolas because I needed support, roots\u2026 I couldn\u2019t be Nicolas\u2019 roots because I was completely uprooted, unbalanced, lost in that crazy world.\u201d He eventually settled in Norway with his wife, model Anne-Line Bjerkan, and their children, while Bardot remained in France.<\/p>\n

\n\tCharrier also answered Initiales B.B.<\/em> in print. In 1997 he published his own book, My Response to Brigitte Bardot,<\/em> saying that \u201cBy giving my version of the facts, I\u2019m doing her a big favour\u2026 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,\u201d per Telegraph<\/em>.<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tDespite the damage created by her own words, there was limited contact later in life. In 1992, Bardot married her fourth husband, businessman Bernard d\u2019Ormale, 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. \u201cI promised Nicolas I would never talk about him in my interviews,\u201d she told Paris Match<\/a><\/em> in a 2024 special issue.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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 \u201ca way to get out elegantly,\u201d 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 \u2014 one her son spent much of his life trying to answer, limit or move beyond.<\/p>\n

\n\tMore on Brigitte Bardot: <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Before you go, click here<\/a> to see all the best celebrity memoirs you can read right now.<\/em><\/strong>
\"Matthew<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.sheknows.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI\u2019m not made to be a mother,\u201d Brigitte Bardot wrote in her 1995 memoir Initiales B.B., adding that she was \u201cnot adult enough\u2026 to take care of a child.\u201d She had put it even more bluntly earlier in life: \u201cI am not a mother, nor do I want to be one.\u201d Those sentences \u2014 and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2214879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25177],"tags":[372058,377633,427991,24003],"class_list":["post-2214878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-celebrities","tag-brigitte-bardot","tag-celebrity-death","tag-celebrity-memoir","tag-celebrity-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Brigitte-Bardots-Memoir-About-Motherhood-Sparked-Her-Sons-Lawsuit.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2214878"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2214880,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214878\/revisions\/2214880"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2214879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2214878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2214878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2214878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}