22-year-old glamour model Nabilla Benattia, dubbed France's Kim Kardashian, has been charged with second-degree attempted murder of her boyfriend Thomas Vergara on Sunday Nov 9. She now has a cell at the la maison d’arrêt de Versailles prison in France, reported Vanity Fair.
If she is convicted, Nabilla faces up to 30 years in prison.
The Swiss-born reality TV star stabbed Thomas repeatedly in the throat and chest on Nov 7. He was in a "serious condition" in the Georges Pompidou hospital in central Paris, while Ms Benattia was also treated for severe shock, according to The Independent.
According to the Daily Mail, Nabilla was originally arrested for "assault and battery" but the allegation was upgraded when prosecutors saw Mr Vergara’s wounds. Officers were called to their hotel room in the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt at 2.30am after staff reported a "major argument with lots of screaming."
Ms Benattia, whose mother is Italian and father is Algerian, was arrested after firefighters got into the couple’s room. She is said to have raised the alarm by calling reception, saying that three men had attacked Mr Vergara outside the hotel, said the DM.
This version of events is disputed by staff and police, however, who say nothing was seen on CCTV, and there was no evidence of Mr Vergara’s blood outside the hotel or in the lobby.
"Her version of events is incoherent," said an investigating source. "It is not backed up by the initial evidence."
A knife is believed to have been thrown out of the hotel room window and had been wiped clean, said the source. Le Parisien reports that the knife was found with Vergara’s fingerprints on it.
Mr Vergara has told police that he does not want to file charges against Ms Benattia, although he may have to give evidence against her, said the DM.
Ms Benattia changed her story several times since the arrest.
Earlier she claimed that Vergara had taken cocaine during the evening and stabbed himself in the scuffle, after a reaction to the drugs. She reportedly tested negative for drugs and alcohol, reported Vanity Fair.
In a third version of her story, Nabilla told the examining judge that Vergara had hit her, several times, after taking drugs, and that she feared for her life.
Luck certainly isn't on Nabilla's side, as earlier this month Vergara entered a hospital in the south of France with a knife wound to his back. He told staff he had “fallen on a kitchen knife,” according to France's Closer magazine.
To make matters worse, in an interview with a Swiss newspaper last January, Benattia said that if she caught her boyfriend cheating on her, she would stab him.
“If I caught my dude cheating on me, I would stab him with a knife,” she said.
The couple shot to fame in France after both appearing in the same TV show "The Reality TV Angels."
The show's producer, Jeremy Michalak, said he was "in a state of shock." He added that he doesn't know what happened and was unable to get in touch with Nabilla for an explanation.
Ms Benattia has a history of disorderly behaviour. As a minor, she spent a month in detention over a fraud conviction in Switzerland. Last year she was arrested in France for allegedly spitting at a railway worker, wrote the DM.
Despite her fame, Nabilla was voted the most disliked person in France in a survey conducted for Voici magazine last year. She's also known as "The Bimbo" in France.
Her last public message, at 9.30pm on Nov 6, told her 1.1million Twitter followers in Arabic-French slang: "I love you guys a lot I swear!!!"
Meanwhile, Thomas's last tweet, in French, read, "I'm all alone, I counted on people, I ended up alone. More hellos, more news. Friendship messed up thrown in the trash." Could he have been hinting at Nabilla?
