“She was attractive, but you know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
Ian Bailey has said that French filmmaker Sophie Toscan du Plantier was not “the most beautiful of people”.
Speaking to Colette Fitzpatrick during Monday night’s The Big Interview, Bailey added that while she was “attractive”, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.
“All I know is from the photographs I’ve seen of her, and to my eyes, she wouldn’t have been necessarily the most beautiful of people,” he said.
“She was attractive, but you know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder as we know.”
Last week Sophie’s son, Pierre-Louis Baudey-Vignaud, called for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) to put Bailey on trial in Ireland while speaking on Friday night’s edition of The Late Late Show.
Baudey-Vignaud said on Friday: “It’s been 25 years. The truth has not arrived yet. We must end this story, for me, for my mother, for Irish people.”
“Irish people, you have a murderer still living in Ireland,” he added, calling on the extradition of Bailey for a trial in France.
Bailey said during the Big Interview that he believes Baudey-Vignaud was speaking directly to him.
“I think he was yeah, I watched that, when I heard that that was going to happen I made it clear that I think I should have been offered the possible chance of redress,” he said.
He added that the interview was “so deeply sad”, saying that he is “hoping and praying” the truth will come out.
“I know he believes that I murdered her, but I had nothing to do with it,” he said.
He also reiterated earlier comments that he has his “own theory” that Toscan du Plantier’s killer is already dead.
Earlier this week Bailey claimed that he knows who killed Sophie Toscan du Plantier, adding that he believed the murderer is already “dead”.
Bailey told Newstalk on Wednesday that he had his own “theory” as to who killed Toscan du Plantier, saying that they passed away “quite a long time ago”.
“Is the killer still alive? I keep seeing this reference, the fact that the killer I think – if my own theory is correct, and I can’t say too much about it – the murderer is dead and has quite a long time ago passed away,” Bailey said.
“I don’t absolutely 100% know… my belief is that the murderer is probably dead – but that’s a belief, I can’t prove that”.
Bailey has maintained his innocence in regard to the murder of French filmmaker Sophie Toscan Du Plantier after first hitting headlines as a suspect in the case.
The brutal murder, which took place in the town of Schull in west Cork in 1996, triggered one of the biggest murder investigations Ireland had ever seen and became a national obsession.
Over the past quarter of a century, facts and information about the death of Sophie Toscan du Plantier are still being released to the public, with most people in Ireland able to give a broad strokes retelling of the murder.
In 2019, a French Court found Bailey guilty of voluntary homicide, sentencing him to 25 years in prison.
Ireland didn’t extradite Bailey due to a Supreme Court ruling in 2012 that the Irish extraterritorial provision was not the equivalent of the French legislation and therefore they were not reciprocal.
Bailey was not present for the French trial after winning the legal battle against his extradition.
Ian Bailey: The Big Interview airs on Monday 13 September at 9pm on Virgin Media One.
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