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Legalbrief   |   your legal news hub Sunday 14 December 2025

Mistress in court battle for dead lover’s millions

The mistress of a Swiss businessman has gone to court to fight for a share of her late lover’s multimillion-rand estate.

Madeleine Kuhn is demanding R16m for maintenance from the estate of Camille Binder who died and left everything to his wife, Elfriede. Kuhn claimed she and Binder were lovers for 27 years and that he bought her a house and maintained her up until his death in 2001. The 59-year-old from Glenvista, south of Johannesburg, said they had a son, John, who died of a heart attack in 2003 at the age of 24, while he was a Rhodes Scholar at Britain’s Oxford University. On Tuesday the Johannesburg High Court ordered that Kuhn’s two claims against the estate and against Binder’s widow be merged. Full report in the Sunday Times