Jamila M'Barek
|
The Right Honourable Jamila, Dowager Countess of Shaftesbury |
|
|---|---|
| Born | c. 1961 (age 55–56) Lens, Pas-de-Calais, France |
| Criminal charge | Murder of the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury |
| Criminal penalty | 25 years in prison, reduced to 20 years in prison |
| Criminal status | Imprisoned |
| Spouse(s) | Raf Schouten (divorced) Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 10th Earl of Shaftesbury (m. 2002, wid. 2004) |
| Children | Raf Schouten Kiara Schouten |
Jamila Ashley-Cooper, Dowager Countess of Shaftesbury (née M'Barek), is the French-born Tunisian widow of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, and is imprisoned for having been an accomplice to the murder of her husband by her brother.
Born circa 1961, she was one of seven children born in Lens, Pas-de-Calais, France to immigrant parents, a Tunisian mother and a Moroccan father. The children were abused by their violent and alcoholic father who worked as a miner.
When Jamila M'Barek was six years old, her mother fled with her and her six siblings to Nabeul, Tunisia, in order to escape from their abusive father. M'Barek spent most of her childhood there. M'Barek moved to Switzerland in her early twenties and then to Paris, where she claimed to have studied acting.
At the age of 17, M'Barek moved to Saint-Tropez where she married her first husband, Dutch businessman Raf Schouten, by whom she had a son, Raf, and a daughter, Kiara. The first marriage ended in divorce.
According to her son, Raf Schouten, M'Barek often went by the name "Sarah" and her children knew her by that name. Schouten believes M'Barek worked as a prostitute even during their short, unhappy marriage. She rarely saw her children, who live on the French Riviera with their paternal grandmother.
In 1993, M'Barek posed nude in Playboy magazine. She later worked for an escort agency on the French Riviera and was looking for a permanent arrangement with one of her wealthy clients after her recent divorce when she, under the name 'Sarah', met the twice-divorced Earl of Shaftesbury in late 2001. Catherine Gurtler, a former madam from Paris who sent M'Barek to the Earl of Shaftesbury, later testified that she had asked for rich clients and she "saw plenty of big-name celebrities during her days working for the agency". According to Gurtler, she hoped to settle down with an affluent and famous man.
M'Barek and Lord Shaftesbury were married at Hilversum in the Netherlands on 5 November 2002. The wedding was first scheduled for spring 2002, but Shaftesbury "felt something was not right". To the disappointment of his family, he became infatuated with M'Barek, buying her a flat in Cannes for £500,000 (£730,000 in present-day terms) and transferring other properties into her name after they married.
...
Wikipedia