"Like her (Adèle Haenel) and like so many others I was sexually abused as a child with the difference that it was by my father." In reaction to the recent announcement of Adèle Haenel to withdraw from the world of cinema for political reasons, Vahina Giocante recounts, Friday, May 12, in a long post on Facebook and Instagram the incest she suffered as a child. But also the violence of the producers' words, the denial and finally its absence that slowly led him to reconstruction.
The French actress is gradually returning to the front of the stage after years made of "all possible and imaginable therapies, cognitive, physical, spiritual. Shamanic experiences. Sacred and psychedelic beverages drunk in forests..." The click, Vahina Giocante had it on the set of the series Mata Hari in 2015. While she dances for a stage, the producers throw her a heavy "well there you have to go, you have to give everything, you have to bandage in the underpants".
The actress says that this sentence had, considering her "passive child sexually abused (...), the effect of a bomb". So like Adèle Haenel after her, Vahina Giocante decides to "send everything to ball". By having "taken special care to remain modest and silent, to protect myself by protecting a system that it is time to collectively put down without violence just by the force of naked truth," she explains. With less noise, without a sound, the actress "disappeared from the media radar in a split second". If her Instagram account is to be believed, she flew to South America, roaming beaches and canyons from Brazil to Mexico.
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It is impossible not to think of Adèle Haenel when reading Vahina Giocante's testimony. Both started cinema very young, as teenagers. Sexual violence too: incest for one, crass paedophilia for the other. Vahina Giocante says she took the brunt of "the violence of this environment that Adèle mentions with disgust, and that we have ALL met more or less frequently and more or less brutally." Also telling the story of these "directors who confuse creative desire with that of the flesh, some producers who try to use their influence in exchange for a few favors, some partners who take advantage of an intimate scene to rub and stick your tongue ... In short, the list is long... And it is these little abuses, these little inappropriate sentences, these looks that undress as well as the difficulty of sending all this little world to shit under penalty of being forced into unemployment that wear out. "
The 41-year-old actress says that "being an actor is often about using your own wounds and weaknesses and offering them to the perpetual gazes and judgments of the audience." She filed a complaint against her father at the age of 17. Then follows a long criminal procedure that will convict him for the crime he committed. Juggling between court hearings and promotions of her films, Vahina Giocante recounts a "time of psychic gymnastics". Especially since the world of cinema is not to facilitate his task. Regularly on set she says she hears the director's injunctions: "Be nice"; "Be pleasant to watch and listen to"; "Be gentle but bandante and please shut up"; "Be sexy but elegant"; "Be a smart asshole because it excites me." Sentences that, she says, end up making her disconnect and flee.
Today, it is "as a woman soothed, solid, built, loved, and free that I return to live in France but especially that I am ready to fuck myself furry, naked, without anything to hide without having to bandage anyone," she confides. Vahina Giocante believes that the time of denial is coming to an end. And now ranks "in the camp of those who dare". The actress predicts that a "still dull rumble rises inexorably", that "nothing and no one can destroy to nothing".