Sandrini Bogunović, left, and her daughter, Katarina Rebrača
A Serbian woman, who once lived at Orson Welles’ Hollywood home and witnessed a legal document contested in settling his estate, vowed in a Belgrade courtroom to commit suicide if she is convicted of embezzlement.
“I’ll hang in the middle of Terazije (the central square in the Serbian capital) if they can prove that I am guilty! I’m not waiting prison,” Sandrini Bogunović, 67, recently stated at Belgrade’s High Court, according to Ringier Axel Springer Media.
Between March 2006 to April 2010, Bogunović; her daughter, model Katarina Rebrača; and two associates allegedly embezzled 37 million dinars (about U.S. $336,000) from a charity established to educate women about breast cancer prevention, according to the indictment.
Bogunović complained in court that her life has been ruined by the legal proceedings, which have dragged on for seven years.
“I live on social assistance – 9,500 dinars. I have no shoes! They destroyed me,” Bogunović told the court. “I cannot go to America.”
An actress-turned- flight attendant, Bogunović was deported from the U.S. years after Welles’ death for organizing the sale of artwork on transAtlantic flights. A participant in several other alleged scams, Bogunović is barred from entering the U.S., Austria, Germany and Sweden, according to Belgrade media reports.
Bogunović had been a witness on a hotly contested legal document during the 1986 court battle between Welles’ companion, Croatian actress Oja Kodar, and his widow, Italian countess Paola Mori.
Serbian law enforcement have accused Bogunovic of masterminding the cancer charity embezzlement.
During a court appearance last year, Rebrača, 45, denied that money from the charity that bore her name was used by for personal purposes. Rather, she blamed any malfeasance on the late Nenad Borojević, the former director of the Institute for Oncology and Radiology.
Borojević, who had been under investigation in an unrelated pharmaceutical scam, committed suicide in January 2012.
If convicted, Bogunović, and Rebrača face up to 12 years in prison.
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