In Élisa Tovati’s book “Thank you for the no: what if our failures were our chances?”, published on October 21 by Éditions du Rocher, Laura Smet looks back on a particularly traumatic episode of which she was a victim. The daughter of Johnny Hallyday and Nathalie Baye recounts a violent humiliation that occurred when she was 12 or 13 years old.
From childhood, the young girl understands that her life is very different from that of her classmates. “Very early on, I understood that I would never be just ‘Laura’. I will always be ‘the daughter of’. And that changes everything,” she confides in this work, relayed by “Voici”. Some teachers contribute to this feeling of exclusion, going so far as to say in front of the class: “In any case, you don’t need to study, your life is all mapped out.”
Prejudices are not confined to school grounds. “Some (parents) told their children that they would not go to my house. Others imagined that, at home, it was a party every weekend,” she says, evoking the fantasies that surrounded her family.
“It’s no longer a story about children making fun”
But an episode will definitely shake up his daily life. After a safari in Kenya with her parents, immortalized by a celebrity magazine, Laura Smet reunites with her comrades. In the playground, several students caught him, urinated in a container before spilling the contents on him, in front of the others. “For the little girl that I was, it was an immense humiliation,” she remembers.
Shocked, the teenager returns home soaked. His mother, Nathalie Baye, immediately appreciated the seriousness of the facts and contacted the establishment as well as lawyers. “It’s no longer a story about kids being made fun of. It’s something else,” explains Laura Smet.
This episode makes her aware of the violence she is experiencing: “At that moment, I understand that what I am experiencing is not normal. That it’s not just meanness. This is harassment.”
