Original subtitles

This is the story of a little girl called Yves Valois,

who grew up to become

Lolo Ferrari, the woman with the biggest

breasts in the world.

Thanks to her incredible bust,

Lolo was an international sex icon.

Hello, my British shams. I am Lolo Ferrari.

Ferrari.

She became a regular on channel four's Euro Trash,

and also had a film and pop career.

But behind Lolo's success was a desperate need for attention.

She needed all the time the attention. Look at me.

Look at me. Otherwise, I don't exist. I will die.

I will really just die.

She's a freak. She's sort of a human freak.

She's a a sideshow, an oddity.

She wanted always to die.

Even when she was small, she wanted always to die.

And on March the fifth, two thousand,

the extraordinary story of Lola Ferrari took its most dramatic turn.

She was found dead from a drugs overdose.

It was thought to be suicide, but it is only now,

five years on from her death,

that the disturbing truth about the death of the woman with the

biggest breasts in the world can be told.

It is a story of fame, prostitution,

hardcore pornography, and possibly murder.

The funeral of Lolo Ferrari in March two thousand was a media

event as dramatic as any during her extraordinary life.

The friends and family who came to mourn were nearly

outnumbered by the television cameras.

Those who did not attend, like Lolo's plastic surgeon, sent flowers.

The grieving was led by Lolo's mother, Catherine Valois,

and Lolo's husband, Eric Vigny.

But despite their hugs,

it was a tense affair with a bitter speech from Catherine

against those she accused of exploiting her daughter.

An autopsy had concluded that Lolo Ferrari had died from an

overdose of pills.

But her mother refused to accept the verdict and almost

two years after Lolo's death was finally granted a second autopsy.

Its findings cast a doubt on the suicide verdict and

suggested she may have died from suffocation.

Police investigating arrested Eric Veen,

Lolo's husband and manager,

on suspicion of the murder of Lolo Ferrari.

We believe Eric Veen killed her

because he did not need her anymore.

It's not possible.

Why? For what reason?

There is no reason. No reason.

Eric Wien was a convicted drugs trafficker and the man who

masterminded the dramatic transformation of fresh faced

Yves Valois into sex bomb Lola Ferrari.

He first met Yves in nineteen eighty seven when she was

living with her parents.

He had just been released from prison.

When Eric hears about her, he's in prison.

And he's told things about her make which makes him,

who not knowing her,

decide immediately wants to go and see me this girl.

So it means that she was probably the picture that

already did of her was that she was incredibly sexy,

but she was like showing herself.

So she was already a personality

that could be used.

She was nice. She was, sexy.

She was,

she was very

very special.

Until she met Eric,

Eve's life had been spent in the quiet seaside town of La

Baulle.

She had grown up in a dysfunctional family where her

father was hardly ever home and her mother found it hard to show her love.

She always tell that it was her parents

who made who make

a lot of bad things with her.

I think that the mother was too young when she had

Eve.

With a miserable family life,

Eve spent her teenage years drinking in the bars of her hometown.

When she was thirteen and fourteen,

already her personality was what it became afterwards in

the sense that she was already very exhibitionist.

She she would go to a bar to dance,

and she would she would say,

I would clean the glasses for you as long as I can be in such

a place in the bar where everyone can see me when they come in.

She was already like that.

Eve was twenty four when such a man did come along.

And Eric Vigna had plans for Eve that would turn her from a

vulnerable young beauty

into a notorious silicon sex bomb.

By the end of nineteen eighty seven,

Yves Valois had escaped from her small town life and

dysfunctional family and fallen from a mysterious ex convict

called Eric Veen.

The couple were married eight months after they had first met.

And with Eric as her manager,

she began looking for modeling work.

The first steps in a dramatic transformation were being planned.

In Cannes, in the summer of nineteen eighty eight,

Eve was discovered by the man who would be responsible for

her first brush with cosmetic surgery.

Serge Jacques was famous for having photographed the young

Brigitte Bardot.

Working with him was a dream come true for the Bardot obsessed Yves,

but the first signs of obsessive behavior were

becoming apparent.

Something was special about her.

You can touch her every part, change her hair,

put makeup on her arms, pushed her legs on on the left,

on the right, no problem.

But as soon as you touch her lips,

just with your finger, she come completely mad.

She was crazy.

Her husband tell me, you can touch everything on her.

You can do what what do you want with her,

but not touch her lips.

Eve claimed she had a mouth complex because her mother had

not breastfed her, something Catherine denies.

Some experts now believe that Eve might have been suffering

from a rare psychological disorder.

Body dysmorphia, boiled down in its simple terms,

is a perception of one's body that is really outside the

realm of reality.

People continue to see something in themselves that

nobody else can recognize or vice versa.

They continue not to recognize something in themselves like

normalcy, for example,

that it would be obvious to the man on the street,

existed otherwise.

So for a woman who has breasts that are extremely large and

still continues to feel that her breasts aren't

large enough.

After the photo session,

Serge Jacque told Yves the photographs did not work

because her nose did not photograph well.

Yves decided to have surgery to correct her nose,

but she needed someone else to design her new look.

She was not a good designer.

And,

well, I was a good designer.

So she like,

like, every time when she was she had

problems, she said, Eric,

can you do it, please?

So it's normal. I I did it for us.

Eric had begun molding Eve into his ideal woman.

But ironically, he was basing his perfect woman on a man,

a transsexual friend of Eric's named Coxinell,

who had been famous on the French drag scene since the sixties.

So of course, more you did,

operations less you look like natural because you didn't look

like anyone else.

So as long as you had an enormous mouth,

enormous breast, tiny waist, and you looked like a doll,

a plastic doll, then you were moving away from being natural.

Over the next five years, Eve had twenty two operations.

By the time she was thirty three,

she had ballooned from a thirty seven d to a fifty four j,

earning her a place in the Guinness Book of Records.

The implants were designed by an engineer who worked on the

Boeing seven four seven.

By the last operation, Yves'

breasts weighed three kilograms each.

The implants were so large that she was rumored to be afraid of flying.

It was often said that Eve was terrified her breasts would

explode if the plane's cabin lost air pressure.

But following her death,

there were still rumors that Eve had died because her

breasts had exploded.

Her extraordinary figure inspired strong reactions.

For some, they made her a flamboyant sex bomb.

For others, an emotionally fragile young woman being exploited by others.

Everybody wants to to appoint Lolo.

I think she had very nice,

surgeon.

Nice people.

And she did not pay a lot of money because,

well, they they were happy to operate

I think plastic surgeons undoubtedly have ethical

responsibilities for what they do.

I know all doctors take an oath to do their best to do well for people,

to perform services that are in the best interest overall in

the health and welfare of their patients.

And I think one could make an argument that a lot of the

procedures done on Lola Ferrari are clearly not in her best interest.

You don't do just anything because someone asks you to do it.

You refuse.

You refuse because if you feel that you're not helping the

person be better or look better,

that you're doing him harm because it's gonna look worse

the way you're going to make him, then you don't do it.

Marc Rubour, Lolo's plastic surgeon,

refused to comment on the allegations against him.

But in letters home to her mother,

Eve appeared to confirm that Eric had forced her into having

cosmetic surgery.

In one letter, Eve writes, mommy and daddy darling,

sorry I love you.

It is not me who wanted to be like this.

He is forcing me and I am scared.

Your darling bunny, Eve.

Eric's explanation is that Eve wrote the letter in exchange

for cash from her mother,

who had always disliked Eric and wanted to split the couple up.

And he claims to have documents which prove that the breast

implants were Eve's idea.

I asked to her

that she sign a paper that she wanted this,

the the the

this this state that it was not my idea.

And she signed me a paper

because

I thought that people would would say that it was me.

When you look at him,

you don't even know anymore either if he's a man,

if he's a woman, if he's out of space,

if he's a sort of third dimension.

He's sort of

so, of course, he has no sense of reality either.

So how could she have had a sense of reality?

He was very scared of operations.

So I think he did make her do all the operations that he

would have dreamed of doing.

You know, instead of changing herself,

because he wanted to change himself as a woman.

But since that's very painful, it was much easier telling her, look,

I'm gonna make more breasts and become slimmer and a tiny waist and all that.

In a way, he used her like like a mirror of him for himself.

After all the operation, yes, I think, she was nice first,

of course, because, I fell in love with her.

At this moment, I thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world,

but I must say that when she was she has been operating,

she was nicer, more beautiful.

The next few years would see Yves Valois become Lolo

Ferrari.

She would drift from prostitution to pornography and

finally find international fame.

But it would come at a tragic price.

By nineteen ninety two,

Yves Valois was the biggest breasted woman in the world.

She was earning money from modeling and stripping in

cabaret shows in Paris.

But younger and cheaper girls were arriving in France from

Eastern Europe.

And so the woman with the biggest breasts on the planet

moved into a very different market.

There was a period when he had little money and then she was a prostitute.

So she was not a prostitute on the street,

but she would go to a hotel.

They sometime her husband would bring her there,

and she would meet someone there.

And it it was she was paid for doing whatever she would do.

After a police raid,

Eric was found guilty of pimping his wife and given a

six month suspended sentence.

Prostitution was no longer an option,

so Yves made the leap from softcore stripping to hardcore pornography.

And for her new career, she chose a new name, Lolo

Ferrari.

She never been a porn star.

She made only one day,

one afternoon,

pornographic

movie.

Only one afternoon.

I don't think with one afternoon,

you can be a porno star after one afternoon.

The problem is with one afternoon,

the stupid people who made stupid movies

make ten movie

with that.

They were able to mix some with other girls with

Uzi, and they make ten.

So after,

stupid journalists say porn star, but she's not porn star.

The future was looking bleak,

but Eric was convinced Lolo was a star who just needed to be discovered.

And so in the summer of nineteen ninety five,

the the pair went to Cannes hoping for a miracle.

Incredibly, they found one.

The film festival had already greeted one Silicon star,

Pamela Anderson.

But it was Lolo who stole the headlines with an impromptu

strip in front of the world's press.

Despite its tackiness,

Lolo's Cannes appearance made her an overnight sensation.

She was offered acting roles in low budget art films.

In one, she played a character who seemed an eerie echo of her own life.

No.

With her film career underway,

Lolo also launched herself as a pop singer.

Her first single, Airbag Generation,

was meant to be a battle cry for big busted women everywhere.

The video, in which Eric plays a small role,

shows Lolo beating the opposition with her larger chest.

Tonight, we are proud to present three of the biggest stars in France.

Lolo Ferrari and her incredible, edible,

bouncing boobies.

Hello, boobies.

In nineteen ninety six,

Lolo was invited to perform Airbag Generation in the UK on

a channel four program Eurotrash.

The program's cheeky attitude seemed perfect for Lolo,

and she quickly became one of its biggest attractions.

Hello, my British champs, and welcome to Lolo Pops.

I am Lolo Ferrari, and I am here to teach you all

about Euro

pop music.

By the end of the year,

Lolo Ferrari's fame

had gone global.

In America, South America, Canada, Australia,

Japan, Russia.

When she was in South America,

there were thousand people waiting at the at the airport.

It was the not the bit of money.

It was the load of money.

Eric was managing an increasingly successful career

and the miserable days of prostitution and pornography

seemed long gone.

Lola was addicted to fame and the media were happy to feed her addiction.

But away from the cameras,

few were aware that the carefree image she projected

hid long term depression,

something that had haunted her throughout her life.

Lola Ferreira did have things that make you think of Marilyn

Monroe.

Marilyn Monroe was that much more closer to to what she was.

She needed all the time the attention.

People looking at her, people that's how she existed.

She didn't exist if you she didn't have the eyes of someone else on her.

Look at me.

Otherwise, I don't exist. I will die. I will.

I'll just die.

Yves' mother had never liked Eric.

She began suspecting that he was not all he appeared to be.

She says that you've got ambiguous sexuality.

Oh, I'm big on sexuality.

No. No. I'm not, not I'm not big on sexuality.

She had or and she had I know I know her secrets.

She had ambiguity. Oh, yes.

My mother-in-law, she has ambiguity. Oh, yes.

And she's very special.

Very special.

I see a lot of things, horrible things with her.

Sexual things.

And all her secrets,

I'm not going to tell that because I have no proof.

But,

if my wife would be here,

she could she could say a lot of things about her mother.

By nineteen ninety eight,

relations between Eric and his mother-in-law were worsening,

and Lolo's fame had begun to fade.

Television viewers were no longer surprised by her,

and she wasn't the attraction she had once been.

But Lola was finding it impossible to leave the spotlight.

When she was doing well, when she was happy,

when she was on the stage, when she was doing, her job,

When people were around her looking after her, no.

She was not depressed.

She was happy

because everybody

were loving her.

She will help me.

The problem is she cannot be on stage if if we every day, if we are.

To try and revive interest and earn some money,

Eric created special Lolo nights.

The nights were popular,

but Lolo lived in constant fear that a crazed fan would leap on

stage and try to puncture her breasts.

During one show in Germany,

she fell off the stage and was unconscious for several minutes

before continuing.

By nineteen ninety nine,

Lola Ferrari could not even find work in German nightclubs.

The public had grown tired of her.

In desperation, Eric found two sisters who were willing to have breast implants

and formed the Silicone Girls.

The band toured the world,

but the Silicone Girls were not a success.

Lola's body had begun to react badly to the sheer number of

operations she had undergone.

She had been warned that the muscles supporting her breasts

would eventually collapse.

She was also having trouble breathing and complained of headaches.

Neuroleptics,

antidepressants,

anxious pains, which were very dangerous.

And she was taking all that every day

every day, all that, three times a day.

And she was able to live with that.

But the problem the problem is these medicines were very dangerous.

Eric has claimed that he never encouraged his wife to take medicine,

but this letter from Lola to her parents could suggest otherwise.

In the letter, Lola complains,

mommy, daddy darling, it started again.

Eric makes me take medicine again. I am scared.

He doesn't talk to me anymore. I am worried.

He says he is going to sell the house. I am scared of working.

He doesn't want me to see my parents.

I would like to die.

Eric says that Lolo wrote that letter under pressure from her mother.

But if the letter's content is true,

it could be a vital clue into the mysterious death of Lolo

Ferrari.

And she was saying all the time,

I want I know I'm killing myself.

She was saying, I know I am killing myself,

but I cannot I cannot do anything else.

I can't act differently.

I think she explained it very well.

She knew that she was somehow killing herself.

It was like, you know,

a train that doesn't know how to stop anymore.

Just has to go till the end. Like that.

By early two thousand, Lolo Ferrari was thirty seven.

She told her parents she was thinking of returning to La

Baul and having the implants removed.

You you can't imagine her coming back to Laboul and

saying, look, forget me the way I was.

I'm not anymore. Lola Ferra. I am f bal bal y again.

And look, I've stopped my breast.

I've gone back down to size b,

and it's not it wasn't even possible.

Her mind, you couldn't do it with her mind.

You could do it with her breast.

You couldn't get her mind to go back to that.

That's why in a way,

I really thought she get she'd let herself die.

In the last week of February two thousand,

Lolo Ferrari met her friend, Martin,

who worked at the funeral parlor.

Despite always claiming to be terrified of death,

Lolo came in and began to discuss her funeral.

In the early evening of March the fourth,

Lolo told Eric that she was feeling ill and that she was

going to bed early.

She said, Eric, you were right.

I'm very ill.

I'm ill. I want to sleep.

I want to go to bed.

I want to sleep until Monday.

So, I I say, yes. Okay. No problem.

She go to our bedroom,

and I told her that she wants because she has fever.

I say, you can sleep alone in the bed.

And I and for the first time in thirteen

thirteen years of our life together,

it was the first time I did not slept with her.

Lolo slept in her own room.

And according to Eric,

when he checked on her at eight AM the next day,

she seemed fine.

But when he awoke again at two in the afternoon,

Lolo was still not up.

And,

go back to the room, see my wife,

and she was still sleeping.

And I shut the door.

But

I think there's something.

She was in the same position than

she was at eight o'clock in the morning.

It's not normal because Eve was is very nervous.

She always moving in the bed,

even when she was when she's sleeping.

You see?

So

I was I I I'm becoming very anxious, of course.

And I opened the door.

I came very,

very I would say, slowly

beside her,

touch her,

you see, because I did not want to to to to wake up, of course.

Touch her.

The legs, the legs were little were hot,

warm, you see.

But but, I think something bad. I was anxious.

And I go back I I go up to the to the head and

and this was the most,

well, the most,

terrific moment of my life.

Her head was,

cool, completely cool, completely,

glassy, glassy, glassy yellow.

Frozen.

Frozen. Yes.

And I understand she was she she was dead, of course.

The life of Lola Ferrari was over,

but the controversy over what or who had caused her death

was only just about to begin.

The house where Lola lived is now a ruin.

The swimming

It was in this home that Lolo Ferrari died on March the

fifth, two thousand.

Medical experts registered her as having died of natural

causes, but the following day,

an autopsy found she had consumed the contents of three

boxes of antidepressants and tranquilizers.

It looked like suicide, a tragic end to a tragic life.

When I saw her when she was dead, well,

she was

very quiet.

You know, her face was very quiet,

very she was dead, but all the same,

the the the face was very, very, very

she was like a young young girl.

The

and, all her depression was gone,

and she was

marvelous.

But Catherine Valois was convinced that her daughter had

not killed herself.

When her lawyer began examining Eric's testimony,

they noticed possible contradictions between his

statements and witness declarations.

At her mother's insistence,

a second autopsy was conducted on the body nearly two years after the first.

This second autopsy in December two thousand and one found

traces of what could have been diet cola consumed the night

before her death or an early morning coffee,

which would contradict Eric's testimony.

And there was something else.

The autopsy found evidence of what it described as mechanical asphyxiation.

Vince said she did she did not move

from the Saturday nine night till the Sunday morning

where he discovered at around two o'clock,

she she died.

In fact, the prosecutor and we,

think that she died on Sunday in the morning after the

breakfast, after have having drink,

coffee.

Because of the conflicting autopsy findings,

Eric was held in this prison in the town of Grasse for a year.

He was released with no charge and is now free pending further investigations.

In this trial, the problem is to know how Eve died.

We believe Eric Green killed her

because he did not need her anymore.

I think that, Eve was exploited as a prostitute.

He was like a pimp.

You know,

but at the end,

he knew that, Eve could not, bring back any more money.

She was distressed.

She get older. She was produced in a Saudi, the nightclub.

Do you think, that a man who loves a woman can do such a thing?

It was the fault of the of the parents who did not understand

the child when she was small.

There were too much problem when she was small.

And the problem stay when she was adult.

Relationships with her mother don't don't did not make,

have this breast, because she lives with Eric

Wien since many years.

She was not, in the same,

home than her mother.

Yes. There were problem like, often girls and mothers.

But the reason the real reason of the her depressed, it was,

the way transformed her.

Five years after her death,

Lola Ferrari lies buried in a cemetery a few miles from her home.

The world has forgotten her,

and the media have found other silicone blondes to celebrate.

But for Eric and Katherine,

the memory of Lolo still haunts them.

Five years is very difficult for me.

I think,

I think it will be always difficult because I'm thinking

to Lolo every day.

I'm praying every day

for for me.

So

it's difficult.

Yes.

Five years, very difficult, but, it is not finished.

Even if I'm free, completely free,

it will be difficult to leave.

Yes.

It would be

The French courts will rule later this year on whether

there is enough evidence to put Eric on trial for the murder of

Lola Ferrari.

Eric continues to plead innocent,

and Catherine continues to accuse him.

But while they wage their war, for some,

the true responsibility for what happened to Lolo does not

lie with any one individual.

Who is responsible exactly for the death of Lolo Ferrari?

Everyone will say her husband.

I would not say one hundred percent her husband.

I would say, to begin with the doctors who operated her and who should

never have done it.

Of course, her husband.

But, again, when you see the husband and you talk to the husband,

you see who he is,

you you realize that he was not an for him,

nothing was strange.

The society in a way,

and I don't like this kind of generalities of society,

but it is true that all these pictures all the time

of the same type of beauty or a sex symbol

over and over and over again,

it makes it very difficult for someone who's fragile in her

mind to feel that you can be beautiful other ways.

So maybe they if someone like her who already was fragile,

that can make you really, really, really, very, very, very sick.

A little tribute to Lolo Ferrari with a double bill of

Eurotrash next tonight.

At five past eleven on Saturday night,

the most controversial music promos in x rated the pop

videos they tried to ban.