He says he still loves her. And besides, he speaks of her in the present tense. Fred Cauvin, real estate agent, lived with Loana from 2013 to 2015. A relationship that was alternately calm and turbulent, which ended with accusations of violence against him on the part of Loana – the violence was not taken into account, he says, specifying that he was convicted of abuse of weakness and trust.
With Fred and his two children, Fight tried family life. The rest of this unexpected interlude of photos with the children at Disney, on beaches, having fun on the sand with a turtle shell on their back… Like many of Loana’s loved ones, Fred is deeply sad today but not deeply surprised. “ It had to happen one day he sighs, I had warned. For me, Loana should never have settled in the South.”
Paris Match. You are the only man she has ever lived with.
Fred Cauvin. Yes, it seems to me. I was his great love. Although there were ups and downs. It was very complicated to manage because I really loved him, contrary to what people said. I tried to do many things for her, but it didn’t work because she was stubborn and narrow-minded. And often, it seemed like she didn’t particularly want to be helped.
How did you meet her?
I met her in 2003 at the Banana Café in Paris. She was the one who came to me. I was alone at the bar and drinking champagne like her at the time. She was at the table with friends. When she came to order, she offered me a cut. Everyone was a little impressed because it was Loana. At the time, I was a TV voice-over and actor. Then we lost touch. And then we met again in 2010 after getting in touch again via social networks. We started a story pretty quickly.
“She had big money problems”
Was she still living in Paris at the time?
Yes, but her apartment was for sale because she had big money problems. She was really caught in the throat by the taxes to which she owed a lot. The apartment sold (680,000 euros), we went to live in the countryside at my place, in Yonne, in a small house.
When you meet in Paris, you discover that many people with bad intentions hang around her…
Loana and Fred Cauvin
© DR
Exactly. In her apartment, she has hosted lots of people. The problem is that she is too nice. She trusts people who don’t deserve it. It wasn’t great among those around her and those she thought of as friends weren’t necessarily friends. And I was arguing with them a bit. I was playing the wrong role. She told me: “But you don’t love anyone.” It’s not that I love anyone, it’s that I feel people and I was trying to protect her as much as possible. I often played the bad role, in the sense that I told him not to drink, not to do drugs. I was a father; Drugs, I’m light years away from that. Cocaine kept her up until two in the morning. To keep up the rhythm and stay with her, I who go to bed at 10 p.m., I happened to taste it but I very quickly stopped. It wasn’t my thing at all.
As he had quite a bit of money left from the sale of the apartment, his mother intervened very quickly to set up a guardianship. Loana had a big problem with money, she had to spend lavishly. She offered trips to friends, to her mother, to everyone, to spend lavishly. She was very generous and spendthrift. In Paris, once her apartment was sold, she rented apartments for herself at €3,000 or €4,000 per month. Her real friends advised her: Loana, you no longer have any news, take a small rent of 1200 euros but no, they were rents of 3000 or 4000 €. It was in one of these apartments that she rented on Boulevard Malesherbes that I left Loana for good and we got into conflicts. She accused me of hitting her, lots of things, she really went overboard. I was cleared of these accusations of assault and battery. But I was convicted of abuse of weakness because I had only stopped working for 6.8 months to take care of her and to do this, we had taken her money.
“She was truly a lovely woman”
In Yonne, at the time, did you seem to be living a normal family life with your two children?
Loana and Fred Cauvin.
© DR
Absolutely. My children, who were two and five years old at the time, Loana saw them grow up. They are very sad today. In Yonne, I really managed to get her to really stop drinking, and there, it’s harder to find drugs than in Paris. I had removed her a little from Parisian life and from all the people she frequented with whom she was tempted to take substances. She didn’t take anything for six, eight months. My children also helped her a lot. The love that she had not felt or given to her daughter, she gave to my children. At the time, I received a backlash; some said that I had kept it out of Paris to “appropriate” it to the countryside.
What kind of step-mom was she?
She gave the children a lot of gifts, gave them a lot of love. She was truly a lovely woman. Along with the mother of my children, she is the only woman I have truly loved. The only one I presented to my son and daughter, the only one. While everyone told me: Not Loana! Don’t leave her with your children, she does drugs, she drinks. But no, I had confidence. Lots of times, I left the kids with him. For them, she was truly a second mother. She took them everywhere, to Futuroscope, to Parc Astérix, to Disneyland… We did everything, she loved them. We had so many good memories. I remember one time we booked a campsite near Cap d’Agde, the most beautiful campsite in the south of France. It was fabulous. We were really a small family having a good vacation…
Have you ever considered having a child together?
We thought about it, we talked about it once or twice, I wouldn’t have minded having a child with her. She would have liked to. In fact, she wanted to have a little revenge for not having been able to raise her daughter, but it was complicated: Beyond her addiction problems, she was also bipolar. She could be very sweet, tender, kind, very pleasant and the next moment very unpleasant. One day she was fine and the next day she was a mess. It was mission impossible to help him. I think if she had had a child things would have been different. But after a year, she wanted to go back to Paris. He missed his friends.
Did she tell you about her daughter Mindy?
No, it’s a taboo subject for her. She talks about it very, very little.
“She was doing so many drugs…”
How did it end between you two in 2019?
In Paris, people put obstacles in our way… She was in an extreme state of dependence. She was taking so many drugs… The complaints of violence that she filed against me, I know that she filed them because she was on substances and people turned her against me. It took me a while to digest. Lately, a mutual friend has been the link between her and me. He clearly told me that she still loved me. She even wrote it on Facebook. I still loved him too. He’s someone I will always love.
She still published photos of bruises that you allegedly gave her…
I explained it to myself. And the violence was not held against me. Many turned their backs on me. Then many came back to me…
You saw her recently on TV: she couldn’t speak, she had changed a lot… Did it hurt you?
Of course ! She upset me a lot and that’s why I told myself that she should never have gone to the South. In the South, she had no one close to her, whereas in Paris, she had plenty of friends. Cyril Hanouna wanted to help her, he offered to work with him and I even think he was considering taking her on set as a columnist. I thank this guy, because he reached out to her many times. Everyone tried to help Loana…
The conditions in which she died, we imagine that it will upset you even more…
Obviously. It’s terrible. But what angers me even more is that in the end, in the South, no one among his so-called friends reached out to him. No one handed him €100 to allow him to stock up on groceries. She died sad and alone.
Alexia Laroche-Joubert paid her rent anyway.
I’m talking about people from the south, not people from the profession. And then it’s weird this girl she lived with in the South. I didn’t know about it. What happened? When she took drugs, Loana was really exaggerated.
In recent years, we have seen Loana on TV sets where she was answering nearby, or she was elsewhere… Didn’t you think it was inappropriate to invite her?
It’s true that inviting someone who isn’t in a normal state is a bit tricky. But she was asking, too! She needed to show herself, she needed to do TV shows, it was her thing.