Leila Trabelsi

Leila Trabelsi was the second wife of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and the figure around whom Tunisian anger at the regime's corruption concentrated before the revolution of 2011. She was a hairdresser from a modest family in Tunis, met Ben Ali in the 1980s while he was rising through the security services, and married him in 1992, five years after he took power. Her large extended family - the Trabelsis - acquired banks, airlines, car dealerships, media, property and the concessions that mattered, to the point where American diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks in 2010 described them as a quasi-mafia and reported that roughly half the commercial elite was connected to the president by blood or marriage. Those cables mattered: they told Tunisians in official language what they already believed, weeks before Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid in December 2010. The protests that followed brought down the government in twenty-eight days. She and Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia on 14 January 2011, and one of the durable images of the revolution is the allegation, never fully substantiated, that she took over a ton of gold from the central bank. Tunisian courts convicted both in absentia many times over on corruption and other charges. Ben Ali died in Jeddah in 2019. She has remained in Saudi Arabia, which has not extradited her, and published a book denying most of it. Her nephew Imed Trabelsi was jailed in Tunisia and became a witness in later proceedings. The yacht stolen from a French businessman by two of her relatives in 2006 was among the incidents that made the family notorious before the revolution. Tunisia set up a truth commission that documented the confiscations.

• Lived: 1956 CE – ?
• Nationality: Tunisian
• Roles: other