Loana Petrucciani in three photos (from left to right): in the Champs Élysées on the evening of her victory in the first season of “Loft Story” (in July 2001), in St Tropez (in 2001), at the Cannes Festival (in 2005)
AFP
Loana Petrucciani, who passed away on Wednesday, March 25 in Nice at the age of 48, never denied her adventure in the iconic show of the early 2000s, “Loft Story.” But she also never stopped telling the other side of the story.
Revealed in 2001 in the French reality TV show “of confinement,” she described both a foundational experience and the beginning of a tumultuous life. “For me, reality TV was my magic wand,” she revealed in 2018 on the show “C & A Vous.” “It brought me a lot.” An experience she refused to reduce to a mere media trap, also mentioning the encounters, travels, and rapid social ascent.
She initially lived “Loft” as a fairy tale. “I experienced it with wonder, like someone going to Disneyland,” she recalled. But very quickly, the story took a dark turn.
Because behind the immediate celebrity, Loana recounts a brutal exit, unprepared. “I didn’t know what was happening to me,” she explained. Shortly after leaving the show, she expected to visit the Eiffel Tower and then return to work, but found herself facing a slew of journalists, forced to answer questions about a life exposed without her control. “If someone had told me what was going to happen, I would have been afraid,” she shared, reflecting on that period of astonishment.
“The phrase sums it all up. ‘We haven’t said anything, but everyone knows everything about you,'” she explained to Anne-Elisabeth Lemoine in 2018. The feeling of being exposed, overtaken by a media machine spiraling out of control. “My whole life was exposed,” she continued, referring to the revelation of her personal story, her childhood, her daughter, before she could even speak about them herself. She described journalists as “intrusive, violent, merciless,” and revealed how she cried every night under pressure.
But with hindsight, Loana refuses to see herself only as a victim. “I wouldn’t change anything in my life,” she asserts, while acknowledging the harshness of her journey. “But I wouldn’t do it again.”
Although “Loft Story” served as a launching pad, she admits that the exposure accentuated her vulnerabilities. She explains that this exposure magnified existing fragilities in her life, leading to a progressive descent marked by loneliness, addictions, and suicide attempts. A trajectory she describes as an “example not to follow.”
In her recent statements, a sense of lucidity emerges. Regarding the first season of the series “Culte,” inspired by her story, she admits, “There was a machine.” In an interview with “Voici,” she mentioned being troubled by revisiting that period, recalling unwanted images she wished to erase.
Twenty-five years later, this introspective view echoes Benjamin Castaldi’s words. The former host of “Loft Story” also acknowledges a broader responsibility: “We all watched. […] We applauded her light without protecting her shadow.”
This observation resonates with Loana’s own words, as she was torn between gratitude and vertigo for a long time. She summarized it herself with disarming simplicity: an “extraordinary” experience, but one for which she never truly stopped paying the price.
