From the promotion of a series came a shocking awareness.
This Tuesday, actress Judith Godrèche filed a complaint for “rape of a minor” against director Benoît Jacquot, with whom she had a relationship at 14, while he was 25 years her senior.
A decision which demonstrates “awareness” for the French actress, who gradually revealed, through the media, the nature of her story with the director.
And which, in passing, undermines the inaction of cinema in the face of sexual and sexist violence in the industry.
The subject was first mentioned in Elle magazine on December 7.
The French actress, known for “L’AubergeEspagne” and “Potiche”, was then due to promote her new series, “Icon of French cinema”, broadcast on Arte.
A partially autobiographical series, which tells the life of a French actress with past success, a little forgotten, who attempts a return fraught with pitfalls after a passage across the Atlantic.
Judith Godrèche returns with a delightful series with autobiographical accents on Arte.
The opportunity to confide for the first time about his relationship, at 14, with the director Benoît Jacquot and about the excesses of French cinema.
Read here: https://t.co/ikopWfbCkN pic.twitter.com/Z4QSHso4ne
— ELLE (@ELLEfrance) December 7, 2023
Between light and humorous moments, Judith, the main character, regularly thinks back to her past relationship with a director in her youth.
At the beginning of the story, he was 39 years old;
she, 14. A situation which, with hindsight, seems unacceptable for the character... And which echoes the relationship, this time very real, of Judith Godrèche with Benoît Jacquot in the 1980s and 1990s.
“We need to tell young girls to be careful.
You can get caught in the net of a more powerful person, and art is an extremely favorable springboard for that,” Judith Godrèche testified in the weekly.
At the same time, the 51-year-old actress undermines an artistic environment which has allowed these excesses, putting young girls in a vulnerable position in the face of powerful artists.
“For me, it becomes perversion,” she continues.
The adult's position in society is to know where to set the limits, even when it comes to art,” she insists.
Each time, the actress refrains from mentioning the name of Benoît Jacquot, but the link has already been made in the media.
Tears on the plateau and “awareness”
At the end of December, in the show “Quelle Epoch”, the emotion resurfaced.
Judith Godrèche is invited to watch an interview dated 1990, where she is interviewed alongside Benoît Jacquot for the release of the film “La Désenchantée”.
She was then 18 years old, and recounted her debut alongside the director, four years earlier.
Her role in the film is that of a “child-adolescent (…) She passes the stage of adolescent-woman.
(…) She experiences in three days what others experience in a year, two years, three years…” she says in the archive.
🗣️ “It’s the first time in my life that I’ve cried on television, it’s done”
👉 The emotion of Judith Godrèche who returned to her controlling relationship with the director Benoît Jacquot, with whom she was in couple at the age of 14
📺 #QuelleEpoque @FranceTV @LeaSalame pic.twitter.com/9WchbdnerH
— What an era!
(@QuelleEpoqueOff) December 23, 2023
This extract, more than 30 years old, pushes Judith Godrèche to tears.
“It’s the first time in my life that I’ve cried on TV, it’s done,” she says, with an almost joking air, to relieve the emotion of the moment.
Here again, she denounces the immobility “of an artistic environment, cinema, which supported this.
No adult ever asked me that question, not even a questioning look, nothing.
»
Above all, these passages in the media function as a catalyst.
“Through the promotion of this series, the women I meet, my daughter's generation, the generation of Alma Struve who plays my role as a child in the series, through them, what they perceive and what they understand and also their perception of consent (…) that there is a form of awareness which moves me”, testifies Judith Godrèche.
“It was so so buried inside me.
»
The name revealed
At the same time, the extract from a documentary by Gérard Miller, a psychoanalyst since accused of sexual violence, resurfaces on social networks.
Dated 2011, and entitled “The ruses of desire: The forbidden”, the extract gives pride of place to Benoît Jacquot, who boasts of his past relationship with the young actress.
“Yes, it is necessarily a transgression because, if only with regard to the law, as it is said, we do not have the right in principle, I believe,” boasts he faces the camera.
“So a girl like her, like this Judith, who was in fact 15 years old
(14 years old, according to the actress),
me 40, in principle, I had no right.
But gosh, she didn't give a damn.
And even her, it excited her a lot I would say.
»
Also read “Icon of French Cinema” on Arte.tv: how Judith Godrèche’s series brings together a community of women
There, the director assumes his approach.
“Making cinema is a kind of cover (…) for morals of this type,” he insists.
“In the cinematographic field, we can feel a certain esteem, a certain admiration for what others would undoubtedly also like to practice.
Which is not unpleasant by the way,” he says.
Disgusted, Judith Godrèche reacted strongly on Instagram.
At the beginning of January, she decided, for the first time, to mention the name of Benoît Jacquot, and therefore to confirm that he was the director whose abuses she denounced.
Physical and sexual violence
She will speak again to the Quotidien program, then to Le Parisien.
“I found this film on YouTube, and I was terribly shocked, physically, I had tremors throughout my body, I felt disgust,” admits the actress.
“It brings up things that I haven't yet managed to articulate to myself, and it shows that I am neither liberated nor relaxed on this subject.
»
This time, the fifty-year-old puts more words on her experience.
Like that of “control”: “I have the feeling that my childhood was stolen from me, and that he speaks for me years after having abused his influence.
It feels like a story that goes on and on, that never stops, so at some point it's time for me to take back my word.
»
And after words come actions.
Judith Godrèche ended up filing a complaint against Benoît Jacquot this Tuesday for “violent rape of a minor under the age of 15 committed by a person in authority” with the Minors Protection Brigade.
To our colleagues from Le Monde, this Wednesday, she explains in more detail the nature of her relationship with Benoît Jacquot, testifies to physical and sexual violence throughout their relationship, until her departure, recorded in 1992. For her part, the director, now 77 years old, “firmly denies the allegations and accusations”.