The French actor Isabelle Adjani has been questioned by police about accusations in a "poison pen" letter that she ordered her bodyguard to beat up a former boyfriend.
Officers reopened their investigation into the attack on the brain surgeon Stéphane Delajoux after receiving the 25-line, unsigned letter.
Adjani's lawyer rejected the "ridiculous" accusations on Tuesday and said his client was the true victim. "Isabelle Adjani is once again the object of false rumours and abject lies," Jérémie Assous said. "She doesn't even have a bodyguard." He added that Adjani, who was once romantically linked with Warren Beatty, and whose former partners include the actor Daniel Day-Lewis and the musician Jean-Michel Jarre, "hoped the author of the defamatory letter would be found".
The letter, sent to Delajoux's lawyer in April, suggested Adjani was behind the attack on the surgeon in December 2009, shortly after the couple ended their five-year relationship. At the time, Delajoux was involved in a bitter and much publicised dispute with the singer Johnny Hallyday, then in a coma after the surgeon operated on his back.
According to L'Express magazine, the letter claimed: "Mademoiselle Adjani ordered her own bodyguard to beat up Monsieur Delajoux (the week was well chosen: the media believed that the attackers were fans of Monsieur Johnny Hallyday)." It added: "The children were crying so much that it was impossible to finish smashing up his face."
Police later interviewed a production company driver matching the name of the "bodyguard" given in the letter, who volunteered a DNA sample for comparison with hairs on a hood left at the scene of the attack.
Delajoux, 44, is a charismatic but controversial medic who boasts an impressive list of VIP clients and who operates in chic Parisian clinics. He came to attention in 2003 after performing a last-ditch operation on the actor Marie Trintignant, who was in a coma after being beaten up by her rock star boyfriend, Bertrand Cantat. The operation failed, and Trintignant died.
Two years later, Delajoux was convicted of fraud, given a suspended sentence and banned from practising for six months after claiming he had been paralysed in a car accident, as part of an insurance scam.
But in 2008 he was credited with saving the life of singer-actor Charlotte Gainsbourg – daughter of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin – after she suffered a brain haemorrhage after a waterskiing accident.
In November 2009, Delajoux operated on Hallyday for a slipped disc. Three days later Hallyday took a flight to Los Angeles, where he was rushed to hospital with an infection and placed in a coma.
Shortly afterwards, Adjani and Delajoux were reported to have split and the actress began legal action in a dispute over money. Around the same time two hooded men attacked Delajoux in the street late one evening as he was leaving a birthday party at his ex-wife's home.
With Hallyday's entourage blaming the surgeon for the singer being close to death, police assumed the assailants were disgruntled Hallyday fans, but with no leads they shelved the case.
Hervé Témime, Delajoux's lawyer, confirmed he had received an anonymous letter and passed it to the prosecutor's office. "I was surprised they acted on an anonymous letter, but they did," he told the Guardian. "I would like to make it clear that neither I nor my client have any suspicions against Isabelle Adjani. None whatsoever."
In France the anonymous letter has long been used to denounce corruption, tax evasion and other misdemeanours; but it is also frequently used to settle scores.
