“I was so docile, I was indoctrinated, it was like I joined a cult.”
On the airwaves of France Inter, Judith Godrèche says it all.
Everything about her “relationship” with director Benoît Jacquot when she was just a teenager.
“I completely followed my guru’s rules,” says the actress at Sonia Devillers’ microphone.
She decided to file a complaint against the filmmaker on February 6.
Since then, an investigation has been opened by the Paris prosecutor's office for "violent rape of a minor under the age of 15" committed by a person in authority.
To discover
The keys to supporting women in their working lives
“Impossible to get away from it”
During the 11 minutes of interview, Judith Godrèche first recounts how the trigger came with the book
Le Consentement
(the autobiographical story of Vanessa Springora which recounts her affair with Gabriel Matzneff when she was 14 and he was 50), which she failed to read at the time of its release.
A month after she denounced the behavior of the 77-year-old director on the set of “Quotidien”, she returns, with more details, to the abuse she suffered from the director, to this supposed affair that began in the spring of 1986, when she was just 14 years old.
“I was his child wife,” said the woman who shared the bed with this man twenty-five years her senior.
She describes a violent relationship: slaps, punches and belts.
“The sexual abuse and sadism happened immediately,” assures the actress and director.
“From the age of 14?”
asks journalist Sonia Devillers.
"Yes Yes of course.
And it also creates a system of lack where I, very quickly, felt completely dependent.
Where he even stages absences... He invents a whole past for himself (...) It was as if, all of a sudden, I had met someone who was the best friend of all my favorite writers, who had slept with all my favorite actresses.
It's like a hand that closes around your heart and squeezes and squeezes and squeezes.
And afterward, it’s impossible to get away from it.”
“I was his child wife”
Mother of two children and now aged 51, Judith Godrèche seeks to understand the influence that Benoît Jacquot had on her.
But she insists on one point: she was never attracted to the filmmaker.
Even though he maintains the opposite.
"I tried to think and say to myself, 'When did I actually look at this man?'
And I told myself that I wanted to go out with him.
“Oh, he’s super handsome!”
But actually, never!”
The budding actress saw in Benoît Jacquot above all “a father figure”, as “the authority on the set”, “someone who spoke to you about yourself as if you had never been seen before”.
“He was creating the portrait of a girl, of a child who will become yours and to resist that, it would take an army of adults.
It would have taken an army of adults,” she says.
“I was never attracted to Benoît Jacquot but I found myself with him and I found myself in his bed, being his wife, his little wife, his child wife.”
Thirty years later, the actress admits she didn't leave because of "fear."
“It was from the moment I started expressing desires or wishes that did not correspond to these rules that it became terrifying.”
And there, the beatings and public humiliations intensify.
Questioned by
Le
Monde
, Benoît Jacquot denies all the accusations.
He insists on the “loving” nature of this long relationship.
The abuses of Jacques Doillon
At the microphone of Sonia Devillers, Judith Godrèche also accuses the director Jacques Doillon, with whom she filmed in
The 15-year-old girl,
released in 1989, of having abused her on two occasions, when she was a minor.
She first mentions events which took place “in the house of Jane [
Birkin, companion at the time of the filmmaker
], in the office of Jacques Doillon”.
“No one saw it and I didn’t tell anyone about it,” she explains.
“But then on set, it was mind-blowing.”
In
The Fifteen-Year-Old Girl
, the actress plays the main role, alongside Melvil Poupaud and Jacques Doillon himself.
At the time, Judith Godrèche was 15 years old and the director was around forty.
“What does he want from you, Doillon,” asks the journalist.
Your acting talent?”
“The same thing answers the person concerned.
“That Benoît Jacquot?
Your body?
And so he abuses you?
continues Sonia Devillers.
Judith Godrèche agrees.
She says today that Jacques Doillon “fired the actor” from the film to put himself in his place and play the character of Willy, father of the heroine's boyfriend, who gradually falls in love with her.
“All of a sudden, he decides that there is a love scene, a sex scene between him and me,” says Judith Godrèche.
She explains that for this scene, “45 takes” were done.
“I take off my sweater, I'm shirtless, he gropes me, makes out with me,” she describes, also specifying that Jane Birkin was present on the filming of this scene.
“This is an extremely painful situation for her.”
Jacques Doillon, whose new film,
CE2
, is scheduled for March 27, has not yet reacted to this testimony.