Meeting with Alé de Basseville, who sold old n-de photos of the wife of the Republican candidate for the White House to the New York Post.
You couldn't miss him on August 2, the height of the summer slump, at this Parisian terrace full of tourists. With a ring on each finger, leather thigh-high boots and a faded ponytail, the photographer who may have just turned the tide of the American presidential campaign was seated there, in the heart of the 6th arrondissement of Paris.
Exceptionally without a kilt (August, no doubt), Jarl Alexandre Alé de Basseville (known as Alé de Basseville) had just landed from Albania, where he was doing a photo shoot for a Balkan magazine. And just landed: the day before and the day before, the publication of his photos had caused an international political-people earthquake. For forty-eight hours, his phone rang non-stop. Text messages, calls, emails said: "Bravo", "Thank you", "Congratulations", "Great"...
The n-de photos of Melania Trump, published two days in a row in the New York Post, are his. The ironically devastating subtitles were the cherry on the cake: "Donald Trump thinks she'll make a great first lady: here's why"; or: "A potential future first lady like you've never seen before."
Fallen through the net of "vetting"
"The idea of publishing them had been circulating in magazines for a year," he confided. But in July, the New York Post won the day. Alé de Basseville swears that he was not paid more than the b-re minimum, but for such a "coup", it is hard to believe that the American daily newspaper, fond of scoops, did not raise the stakes... A few days earlier, the Frenchman Jean-Yves Le Fur, head of Lui magazine, had been refused the photos: his financial proposal was not attractive enough. "I was interested in publishing them in the New York Post," explains Alé de Basseville, "because they have a very popular readership that cannot know my artistic work. Above all, they are very conservative, I loved the idea," he adds with a smile.
On April 15, in fact, the newspaper made its support for Donald Trump official. Three and a half months later, these more than suggestive photos have emerged, apparently having slipped through the net of vetting, the meticulous examination carried out by the candidates' teams to clean up anything that could disrupt or taint their protégé's campaign.
