When she was still a minor, actress Judith Godrèche became, in her own words, the "child-wife" of director Benoît Jacquot, with whom she worked on the film "Les Mendiants", in 1988. At the time , she was 14 years old, he was 39. They remained together for six years, forming an illegal couple, but known to everyone and whom no one denounced. Decades later, at the end of 2023, Judith Godrèche released the series “Icon of French cinema”, an autofiction inspired by her experience with the director. It is the beginning of an awareness of what she experienced, and which she has long described as a “couple relationship”.
Becoming a mother, seeing her daughter Tess Barthélémy reach, then exceed the threshold of 14 years, telling her story for television.... So many elements which ended up infusing. All that remained was to discover an interview with Benoît Jacquot in a documentary by Gérard Miller - who has since also been accused of sexual assault... - devoted to "L'interdit", in 2011, in which he declares about the young actress: "I don't know anymore, if only with regard to the law, as it says itself, we don't have the right in principle, I believe. So that a girl like her, like this Judith, who was in fact 14 years old, me in principle, at 40, I didn't have the right, I don't think. It excited her a lot." And he adds, with disconcerting transparency: “Making cinema is a kind of cover… in the sense of illicit trafficking. It’s a kind of cover for morals of this type.”
Judith Godrèche's words were not suddenly released. Between the promotion of her series, the discovery of these remarks, the slow awareness of what she describes as "the influence" exercised by Benoît Jacquot and, finally, her decision to file a complaint for "violent rape of a minor under 15 years old,” weeks passed.
In the process, the actress filed a complaint, also before the juvenile brigade, against the director Jacques Doillon, whom she accuses of having abused her, during the filming of the film "The 15-year-old girl ". Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon both refute these accusations.
Also read #MeToo: actress Judith Godrèche files a complaint against Jacques Doillon and Benoît Jacquot
But other women gave their testimonies. After Judith Godrèche, Benoît Jacquot had a relationship with the actress Isild Le Besco, who denounced "psychological or physical violence" on his part, or with Virginie Ledoyen. Both were minors at the time of the events. Concerning Jacques Doillon, Isild Le Besco says she was removed from the film "Carrément à l'Ouest" (2001) after four to five weeks of work and refusing to sleep with the director. For her part, Anna Mouglalis speaks of a sexual assault at home in the summer of 2011.
For our guests, this #MeToo wave, which is sweeping French cinema, could be the right one. Despite a French culture which glorifies culture, and the togetherness of the "great family of cinema", the word seems to be freed for good. Médiapart journalist Marine Turchi evokes as a tangible sign of a change in mentality, the platform of support for Gérard Depardieu, signed by around sixty personalities, almost half of whom subsequently withdrew, compared to more than 700 signatories, ago a few years, in favor of director Roman Polanski, who admitted to having had "illegal sexual relations" with Samantha Geimer, when she was only 13 years old. He has since been questioned by other women. The director will, moreover, be tried for defamation on March 5, 2024 for having doubted the veracity of the accusations of sexual abuse made against him by the actress Charlotte Lewis.
Omerta
As for the column defending the “freedom to annoy”, published in Le Monde in January 2018, in the midst of the Hollywood #MeToo wave, and signed by around a hundred women, including Catherine Deneuve, it would undoubtedly not have the same echo today.
However, it remains difficult to denounce abuses in the cinema industry. On a shoot, the directors hold a lot of power, the teams operating in isolation, as if in a universe parallel to the real world, where labor laws are not exercised as elsewhere, believes Alma Jodorowsky. Those who speak out to denounce are accused of sabotaging the work of everyone else, adds Luana Duchemin, and of threatening the release of a film on which dozens of people worked.
There are very few men, actors and technicians, who speak alongside them. And experience proves that women who dare to speak often find themselves excluded, like the actress Charlotte Arnould, who accused Gérard Depardieu of rape, or Adèle Haenel, who decided to leave the world of cinema, after the consecration of Roman Polanski at the Césars in 2020. She got up and left the ceremony, scandalized. Attacks on minors affect her closely; she herself had also recounted the touching and harassment she suffered when she was a minor from the director Christophe Ruggia. "I decided to politicize my cessation of cinema to denounce the general complacency of the profession towards sexual attackers and more generally, the way in which this environment collaborates with the deadly racist ecocidal order of the world as it is ", she explained.
Judith Godrèche launched an email address to collect other testimonies: moiaussijudith@gmail.com.
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