Michèle Bennett
First Lady of Haiti
Michèle Bennett (born 15 January 1950) is the former First Lady of Haiti and the ex‑wife of former President of Haiti, Jean‑Claude Duvalier. They fled to France together when he resigned in 1986; they divorced in 1990.
Early life
Michèle Bennett was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1950, the daughter of Aurore (née Ligondé) and Ernest Bennett, a Haitian businessman and descendant of King Henry I of Haiti. Her father owned more than 50,000 acres (20,000 ha) of land, growing mostly coffee, and employing 1,600 estate workers in addition to 900 more in his business. Her uncle was Haiti's Roman Catholic Archbishop, François-Wolff Ligondé. At 15, Bennett moved to New York, where she was educated at St. Mary's School in Peekskill. She went on to work as a secretary at a slipper company in New York City's Garment District. In 1973, she married Alix Pasquet, Jr., the son of Captain Alix Pasquet, a well-known mulatto officer and Tuskegee Airman who, in 1958, led a coup attempt against François Duvalier. By Pasquet, she had two children, Alix III and Sacha.
The public source identifies “Michèle Bennett” as first Lady of Haiti. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Michèle, Bennett and First.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4291089. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1950, 1986, 1990 and 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michèle Bennett” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.