Madame Nhu - Life in Exile

Life in Exile

The military government of Vietnam under General Dương Văn Minh confiscated all of the property in Saigon that belonged to Madame Nhu and her family, and she was not allowed to return to South Vietnam. She went to Rome briefly before moving permanently to France with her children. Her daughter, Lệ Thủy, died in 1967, at age 22, in an automobile accident in Longjumeau, France.

On 2 November 1986, Madame Nhu charged the United States with hounding her family during the arrest of her younger brother, Trần Văn Khiêm, who was charged in the strangling deaths of their parents in their Washington, D.C. home after being cut out of their will.

In the 1990s, she was reportedly living on the French Riviera and charging the press for interviews. In 2002, Madame Nhu gave an interview to journalist Truong Phu Thu of Dân Chúa Mỹ Châu, a Vietnamese Catholic community publication. It was published in October 2004. The article stated that she was living in Paris and working on her memoirs.

In 1993, she sued her parents' insurance company to prevent it from awarding their death benefit because she contested the validity of their wills. Her parents allegedly changed their wills, disinheriting their son Khiem and Madame Nhu and making their sister Le Chi the sole beneficiary.

In her last years, she lived with her eldest son, Ngô Đình Trác, and youngest daughter Ngô Đình Lệ Quyên, in Rome, and was reportedly working on a book of memoirs to be published posthumously. Her memoirs would be written in French and would be translated into Vietnamese and Italian. In early April 2011, she was taken to a hospital in Rome where she died three weeks later, on Easter Sunday, 24 April 2011. News of her death was announced by her sister Lechi Oggeri. Family friend Truong Phu Thu was interviewed by BBC News after Madame Nhu's death.