(Paris) French actress Judith Godrèche denounced Monday on social networks the support enjoyed in the cinema world by director Benoît Jacquot, with whom she had a relationship when she was a teenager and who never hid his attraction to very young actresses.
The actress very recently mentioned this relationship of several years with the French filmmaker, 25 years her senior, in the series Icon of French Cinema on the television channel Arte, but she had never before so explicitly questioned the director.
Asked by AFP, Benoît Jacquot did not wish to comment.
The denunciation of Judith Godrèche comes in the midst of a fracture in French cinema caused by star actor Gérard Depardieu, indicted for rape and widely criticized after the broadcast of images in which he multiplies misogynistic remarks.
“The little girl in me can no longer keep quiet about that name,” she says, in a message posted on Instagram over the past weekend, deleted before being re-uploaded on Monday, where she speaks of “control” and “perversion.”
“His name is Benoît Jacquot. He still manipulates those who might associate their names with mine. Bear witness. He threatens to take me to court for defamation,” said the 51-year-old actress, believing that the filmmaker is “esteemed for his perversion.”
“Who has respect for BJ practices? Known to everyone for 35 years? Who endorses and validates? The agent representing him? […] Where does this feeling of impunity come from? Everything was known. And the same people are on the maneuvers,” she continues, saying she fears that people will “turn their backs” on her after these comments.
A speech motivated by the viewing of a documentary where Benoît Jacquot assumes the transgressive aspect of his past relationship with the teenager. “Yes it was a transgression. If only with regard to the law […] we do not have the right in principle, I believe. A girl like her who was in fact 15 years old, and I was 40, I had no right,” we can hear her say in the documentary dated 2011.
Judith Godrèche was revealed in Les mendiants de Jacquot (1988) then La disenchantée (1990). The filmmaker built his work around actresses, including stars like Isabelle Huppert.
“I can only film an actress if I am in love with her,” the director assumed in 2009 in the newspaper Le Figaro.
