After Judith Godrèche, it is the turn of other women to denounce the violence and sexual harassment of director Benoît Jacquot.
In
Le Monde
, actress Julia Roy, 34, speaks.
She first remembers her first meeting with the filmmaker, during a conference given at Sciences Po Paris, on January 29, 2013. At the end, the 23-year-old student approaches to greet the host of the encounter.
“Benoît Jacquot jumps on me to give me a paper with his number, and asks me several times to call him.”
A movie buff since childhood, Julia Roy ended up contacting him again.
An appointment is made at the restaurant Le Hangar, in the Marais.
From the first exchange, there are big declarations: “He tells me that he is going to make all his films with me, that he will help me write mine, that he wants to have me with him all the time and before him.”
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The keys to supporting women in their working lives
Six years later, traumatized by the relationship formed with the man who revealed her in
Forever
, the Franco-Austrian actress fled to Austria.
“I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome,” she confided to journalists from Le
Monde
, Lorraine de Foucher and Jérôme Lefilliâtre.
Also read “I found myself in his bed, being his child wife”: the chilling revelations of Judith Godrèche about Benoît Jacquot, then about Jacques Doillon
“He starts calling me a whore and a slut”
Today, Julia Roy is determined to tell everything.
Denounce everything, encouraged by the testimony of actress Judith Godrèche who recently denounced the director's control over her when she was a teenager.
Julia Roy describes in particular a relationship “composed of manipulation, domination, physical violence and sexual harassment”.
And it was in 2015, on the set of Forever
,
a film of which she was the screenwriter and in which she played the main role opposite Mathieu Amalric, that the first traumatic episode took place.
“In a hotel room in the Algarve in Portugal, he [Benoît Jacquot] starts to insult me, to call me a whore and a slut,” relates the actress.
Over time, the relationship fades.
The blows are coming.
One day, the slap was so powerful that it knocked her to the ground.
Benoît Jacquot controls everything in Julia Roy's life: her food, the length of her hair, her way of dressing and speaking, her study plans... The young woman says: "He wanted to control everything that I did.
When I confronted him about his verbal and physical abuse, he would deflect everything, pretending that none of it had happened, and his speech was often contradictory.
I began to doubt my own feelings, to lose my free will and my critical mind.
I no longer had confidence in myself.”
However, Julia Roy does not cut the relationship short.
Out of fear once again, like Judith Godrèche.
It must be said that Benoît Jacquot threatens to tarnish his reputation in the cinema.
And when she accuses him and defends herself, he seeks to buy her silence by donating his house in Greece.
Today, Julia Roy is passionate about writing.
She should also soon move on to directing her first short film.
Questioned by
Le Monde
, Benoît Jacquot denies it, even if he recognizes certain facts.
“I kicked his ass, during a dinner in Florence, in a hotel where we were staying.
But it wasn't a punch in the gut.
It was like something you do to a child to calm him down.
I don’t feel guilty about that today.”
“Without wearing panties”
In the columns of Le
Monde
, Julia Roy is not the only one to testify to the abuse inflicted by the director of
Villa Amalia
(2009) and
Les Farewells to the Queen
(2012).
Vahina Giocante, in the cast of
No Scandal
in 1999 alongside Fabrice Luchini, Vincent Lindon and Isabelle Huppert, describes a perverse filmmaker, consumed by his fantasies.
The first shot of
No Scandal
in which the actress appears shows her getting out of a bed where she spent the night with an older man.
“I’m doing the scene for the first time,” she remembers.
Then, Benoît Jacquot comes to see me and asks me to do it again without wearing panties under the T-shirt.
This makes no story sense, since it covers my panties.
But he makes me understand that I have no choice.
I go to the dresser and ask her to give me flesh-colored panties or a thong.
She panics a little, because she's afraid of getting fired, but she ends up saying yes.
I redo the scene with this accessory, without saying anything.
Benoît Jacquot looks at me from below, with this little smirk and says to me: “You see, it wasn’t that difficult.”
For him it was only a question of power, a personal fantasy.”
During filming, Benoît Jacquot also tried to blackmail him.
One day, he said to her: “Do you understand that, if you are nice to me, you will do the next one?”
For Vahina Giocante, the proposition is obvious: if she sleeps with him, she will get a role in his next film,
Sade
.
The young woman declines, she will never film with the filmmaker again.
“My image, my body nourished fantasies”
In
Sade
, released in 2000, it was ultimately Isild Le Besco who was chosen to play Émilie de Lancris.
During filming, she was 16 years old and began a relationship with Benoît Jacquot, 52 years old at the time.
The affair lasted several years, until the film
The Intouchable
(2006).
To Le
Monde
, she replied that she did not feel “ready to talk about this story in the press”.
But she confirms that she too suffered “psychological or physical violence” from the French director.
“Like all these actresses who speak today, it took me time to understand where my limits had been crossed, how, by whom,” she wrote in a text sent to the journalists of the investigation.
As with many of them, my personal history predisposed me to being used, objectified.
Like them, my image, my body nourished fantasies when, just as a teenager, I was not even aware of being sexualized.
Once again, contacted by
Le Monde
, Benoît Jacquot completely denies the accusations.