After five years of particularly heated proceedings, Coline Berry-Rojtman, the daughter of actor Richard Berry, was definitively acquitted in the defamation proceedings brought against her by her former mother-in-law Jeane Manson since 2021, franceinfo learned on Wednesday October 7, after having consulted the judgment rendered to this effect by the Lyon Court of Appeal on September 22.
Coline Berry-Rojtman, 50, revealed in February 2021 in Le Monde that she had filed a complaint against her father for rape and sexual assault suffered during her childhood in the mid-1980s, which he always firmly denied, denouncing his daughter's "destructive madness". The complaint also targeted American singer Jeane Manson, who was the actor's partner at the time of the events described, with Coline Berry-Rotjman claiming to have participated in the couple's sexual games on multiple occasions.
Jeane Manson, who also categorically refuted these accusations, had filed a complaint for defamation against her ex-daughter-in-law following this article, but also against comments made on BFMTV in March 2021. Coline Berry-Rotjman had affirmed on the set of the channel that her former mother-in-law had been a member of the Children of God, a sectarian movement founded in the United States in the 1960s and known for scandals of pédocriminalité. The singer assured that she had never frequented this organization.
Conflicting decisions followed one another from year to year. At the end of a first trial in April 2022, Coline Berry-Rojtman was first sentenced at first instance by the Aurillac court (Cantal) to a fine of 2,000 euros for defamation against Jeane Manson and to pay her 20,000 euros in damages, as well as 5,000 euros for her legal costs.
The Riom Court of Appeal (Puy-de-Dôme) then confirmed this conviction, increasing the legal costs owed to Jeane Manson by 5,000 euros, or 10,000 euros in total. In July 2024, a second court of appeal, that of Lyon, however acquitted Coline Berry-Rojtman, after the annulment by the Court of Cassation of the first judgment.
This decision was contested by Jeane Manson, who then in turn appealed to the highest court: the Court of Cassation therefore intervened again in December 2025, finally canceling in part the acquittal from which Coline Berry-Rojtman had benefited, referred, once again, to the Lyon Court of Appeal, but only for her comments made on BFMTV.
The Lyon judges put an end to this interminable procedure with their judgment delivered on September 22, also relaxing Coline Berry-Rojtman on this aspect. Contacted by franceinfo, she said she felt “immense relief”.
“For almost five years, I was attacked for denouncing the abuse I suffered when I was a child. (...) I was judged, but my father and Jeane Manson never will be.”
The investigation targeting the actor and his ex-partner, accused of incest, was effectively closed on August 31, 2022 due to statute of limitations. “So yes, an injustice stops. But justice has not happened,” laments the fifty-year-old, who has become a psychotherapist.
Coline Berry-Rojtman was invited to testify last spring before the National Assembly's commission of inquiry into incestuous sexual violence, where she reiterated her accusations against her father, recounting "repeated rapes, almost every weekend".
Her lawyer, Patrick Klugman, considers that she "experienced a campaign of slander intended to crush and engulf her and the main instrument of which was Jeane Manson's complaint." “At the end of too long a legal battle, there is nothing left, except the courage of Coline to have faced her demons and to have fought against those who wanted to silence her,” he adds to franceinfo.
Jacques Verdier, Jeane Manson's lawyer, specifies that he has not filed a cassation appeal for his client, which therefore marks the end of the procedure. He maintains that Coline Berry-Rojtman's intention was to "harm" her former stepmother, while Jeane Mason, according to him, "never accepted that a child engages in touching imposed by her father on her own body and on the body of her father".
