French actress Judith Godrèche denounces two filmmakers for raping her as a teenager | Culture

That the French filmmaker Benoît Jacquot liked teenage girls and that he took advantage of his position of power and prestige with them was no secret. He himself had spoken in public about the relationship that he had between 1986 and 1992 with the actress Judith Godrèche and that began when she was a teenager. “In view of the law, you don’t have a right in principle, I think. She was 15 and I was 40. I didn’t care and I would even say that she was very excited about it,” he said with a half smile in a 2011 documentary.

Two years later, Jacquot would obtain three César awards, the French equivalent of the Goya, for Farewells to the Queen. He was not a top-notch director, but he was a consecrated and admired figure. All in order. Until now.

Godrèche, who is now 51 years old, has broken his silence. After premiere a series at the end of 2023 television show in which she recounted part of this stage of her life, this week she denounced the filmmaker for rape. He has also denounced another director of the same generation as Jacquot, Jacques Doillon, author, among other films of The 15 year old girl. Godrèche has opened the floodgates to accusations from other actresses against both directors in the world of French cinema, seven years after the start of the Me Too movement. In U.S.A.

“It is a story like the stories of kidnapped children who grow up without seeing the world and who cannot think badly of their kidnapper,” reads one text, quoted by Le Monde and that Godrèche prepared before denouncing Jacquot on February 7. “I would have wanted Benoît to agree to be my friend, no having me, I didn’t want his body. Right away she disgusted me.”

That same day, she reported Doillon for two episodes of sexual abuse. One during the filming of The 15 year old girl, and in front of the cameras, the film crews and Doillon’s then partner, who in addition to directing also acted. “Suddenly, he decides that there is a love scene, a sex scene between him and me,” Godrèche explained on Thursday on the France Inter network. “I take off my sweater, I’m left bare-chested, he rubs me, he rubs me.” The second episode, in the Parisian home that Doillon shared with his partner at the time, the actress and singer Jane Birkin.

Jacquot, in an interview with Le Monde, denied the accusations and defended that the relationship with the actress had been purely loving. The age of sexual majority, at the time of the reported events, was 15 years and the filmmaker maintains that, although they began to be a couple when she was 14 and he was 39, they did not have sexual relations until she was 15. “And not for lack of desire,” he told the aforementioned newspaper. Godrèche says she was 14, so it would have been illegal.

Doillon told Agence France Presse: “That Judith Godrèche and, through her, other women decide to denounce a system, an era, a society, is brave, laudable and necessary. But the justness of the cause does not authorize arbitrary denunciations, false accusations and lies.” Neither Jacquot nor Doillon are charged and for now the Prosecutor’s Office has opened preliminary investigations. The facts have probably expired.

Godrèche met Jacquot in 1986, when the filmmaker selected the actress for the film I beg thems. in the series Icon of french cinemawritten, directed and starring Godrèche, and premiered in December on the ARTE network, the scene of the casting. “Do you have a little friend?” the director asks the girl. “You remind me of Balthus’s heroines,” she tells him at another point, alluding to the painter who portrayed young women.

In six chapters of half an hour each, and in a tone between light and melancholic, the series tells it all, or almost. It is the story of a fallen French actress who returns to Paris after a few years in Los Angeles. The story alternates between her current life and her life as a teenage actress under the influence of an adult director. Like the Judith of the series, the real Judith was the daughter of divorced parents who did not set limits for her. “Why did you let me go with a 40-year-old man?” she asks her mother. There’s no answer.

In Le Monde, Godrèche describes Jacquot as a violent man. When she was 17, he wanted to buy an apartment in the Marais, a central neighborhood in Paris, but she didn’t have enough money. She then obtained legal emancipation from her father to use her savings and be able to buy the apartment together. It was a dependency relationship, according to her testimony: “I was completely isolated. “I had separated myself from all social life.”

“It was as if I was locked up, I had to ask Benoît’s permission for everything, even for him to spend Christmas with me,” the mother tells the aforementioned newspaper. “And she was still a child: she had a stuffed animal.” In the same report, Jacquot defends himself: “I was trapped by her. No irony: I’m the one who was under her influence for six years. “I think if he hadn’t left, I would still be with her today.”

Regarding the alleged abuse committed by Doillon during the filming of The 15 year old girl, Godrèche declared: “It was amazing.” She was, like the protagonist, 15 years old. He, over 40. Jane Birkin was also on the set, who wrote in her diaries: “I kissed Judith Godrèche 20 times in a row and asked me which was the best take. A real agony!”

Around the same time, Birkin’s ex-partner, Serge Gainsbourg, was in a relationship with a woman he had met when he was 57 years old and she was 16. Her name was Constance Meyer and she would tell it years later in a book. “I fell in love with an older man, but it was legal,” she Meyer told EL PAÍS. “He had no influence on me. There is no problem.”

Godrèche was one of the actresses who in 2017 reported an attempted rape by American producer Harvey Weinstein and thus contributed to starting the Me Too movement. She said that when reading in 2020 The consent, by Vanessa Springora, realized that it told her experience. Springora recounted how she was seduced, at the same time as the events reported by Godrèche, by the writer Gabriel Matzneff. She was 14 years old; he, 50. Matzneff enjoyed the aura of the writer; Jacquot, from the filmmaker.

“In a certain way, filmmaking is a kind of cover for this type of customs, in the sense that you have cover for illicit trafficking: ‘Ah, the filmmaker is an artist, he is making an artist, these are his things. …”, said Jacquot in the 2011 documentary. “And at the same time, in the film world you can notice that there is a certain esteem or admiration for what others would like to practice as well. There is something of this too, which is not unpleasant.”

The director of the documentary, the media psychoanalyst Gérard Miller, has been accused by 18 women in the magazine elle of sexual assaults. Miller denies this.

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