Bernard Tapie’s Unlikely Bond with Young Cancer Patient Revealed in New Book

Paris Match publishes an excerpt from this book, in particular page 41. The story goes back to 1986. "One day, his son Laurent told me about little Zora, a young girl of about fifteen years old of Moroccan origin, who had written to Bernard Tapie, in 1986, a letter to which was attached a photo of him that she asked him to return autographed. She was suffering from lung cancer and hinted that things were not going well. Moved by her letter, the Tapie couple had gone to visit her at the hospital in Boulogne where she was in palliative care," recounts the journalist Franz-Olivier Giesbert.

"Thanks to the information that Laurent had given me, I was able to get his father to talk, who told me: ’When we left, we were moved to tears, my wife and I. In her bed, she looked like a fragile little gazelle. She was completely bald. When, after the visit, we had asked the doctors how long they gave her to live, they had answered: ’Three or four months, no more.’ With her family having remained in Troyes where she lived in a kind of shantytown, Zora was alone in the hospital. We decided, with the agreement of her parents, to take her home with us.’ Tapie put her in the hands of his friend Dr. Christian Duraffourd, the king of phytotherapy, who decided to stop chemotherapy and treat her in his own way, with plants," continues the writer.

"Zora’s case was desperate but, thanks to this treatment, the terminal phase finally lasted a year and a half. In the meantime, Zora became part of the Tapie family until her death. ’She regularly went back to her parents,’ reports Laurent, who was then twelve years old, ’but she lived with us, she was like my big sister. We took her on winter sports trips to La Sauze, we also went to Morocco with her’".