Novelist Gay Courter and Four Others Face May 2027 Trial Over Shipwreck Gold

A French criminal court in Brest will try American novelist Eleanor "Gay" Courter, her husband and three French nationals on May 27, 2027, over the resale of gold looted from an 18th-century shipwreck. Agence France-Presse reported the trial date this week. All five defendants, aged 76 to 84, face conspiracy charges; some also face charges of money laundering and receiving stolen goods.

Who are the defendants?

• Gay Courter, 82, a best-selling author of fiction, nonfiction and memoir — mainly historical fiction and thrillers, per her website. None of her books involves gold looted from a shipwreck.
• Philip Courter, 84, her husband, a film director.
• Yves Gladu, 79, a professional underwater photographer.
• Brigitte Gladu, 76, his wife.
• Annette May Pesty, 80, his sister-in-law.

Where did the gold come from?

The story starts in 1974, when divers found Le Prince de Conty, a French trading ship that sank off Brittany in 1746. The wreck lay 30 to 50 feet underwater near the island of Belle-Île-en-Mer, according to France's Department of Underwater Archaeological Research (DRASSM, the state agency for underwater heritage). After gold bullion turned up at the site, looters plundered it in 1975. Lawsuits froze the wreck until the mid-1980s.

When archaeologists resumed excavation in 1985, they recovered 18th-century Chinese porcelain, tea crates and three ingots of Chinese gold. That same year, a storm battered the wreck and reburied it.

How did investigators connect the gold to the defendants?

The current investigation opened in 2018. Michel L'Hour, then-director of DRASSM, spotted a suspicious sale of five gold ingots on a US auction house's website and told US officials he believed they came from Le Prince de Conty. Authorities seized the objects and returned them to France in 2022.

Investigators identified Gay Courter as the seller. She said Pesty and Pesty's late partner, Gérard, had given her the gold. Pesty had shown the gold on Antiques Roadshow in 1999, claiming she found it while diving near Cape Verde. Investigators found that story implausible and turned to Yves Gladu.

In 2022, in custody, Gladu confessed to looting 16 gold bars over 40 dives to the site between 1976 and 1999. He said he sold the gold in 2006 to a retired military officer in Switzerland and denied any link to the Courters. But investigators found Gladu had known the couple since the 1980s and vacationed with them three times.

The Courters were detained in 2022 and placed under house arrest. Investigators determined the couple had held at least 23 gold bars and sold 18 of them for nearly $200,000. The Courters say that money was meant for Gladu.

What does the trial change for them?

Their lawyer, Grégory Lévy, told the Guardian last year that the couple had no idea the gold was looted and "didn't see the harm as in the United States regulations for gold are completely different from those in France." He said they did not profit from the sales. This week, Lévy told AFP he will argue for their acquittal; the Gladus declined to comment.

At stake is how a half-century-old looting of a protected wreck gets apportioned among five aging defendants — and whether a jury accepts that the sellers of 18 gold bars never asked where they came from.