(Neuilly-sur-Seine) French actress Emmanuelle Béart publicly reveals that she was a victim of incest between the ages of 10 and 14, in a documentary she co-directed.
“His attacker was not Guy Béart”, his singer father who died in 2015, said co-director Anastasia Mikova on Tuesday during the presentation of the documentary at the premises of the M6 channel, which will broadcast it on September 24.
Ms. Mikova said she made this clarification at the request of the 60-year-old actress, who was not herself present for “family reasons.”
Emmanuelle Béart “does not wish” to reveal the identity of her attacker, because this is not “the approach” of the film, continued her co-director and friend.
In this documentary entitled Un silence si noisy, the two women collect the words of four other victims of incest, and Emmanuelle Béart echoes elements of her own story.
“If my father, my mother, my school, my friends don’t see anything, it means everything can start again, and you will start again for 4 years,” she says in voiceover, addressing the person who attacked. According to her, it was her grandmother who “saved (her) skin”.
“I didn’t want to speak up, I wanted to create a space for others to speak. Confronted with them, with their sincerity, with their courage, I told myself that I too had to speak,” explained the actress in a video message shown to the press before the film.
“It’s a project that I’ve had in my head since I was 19,” added the one who was revealed by the film Manon des sources in 1986.
The documentary “is not a film about victims, but about beings who have been victims and who are fighting,” she also declared in an interview with Elle magazine published on Tuesday.
The witnesses are Norma, raped by her grandfather in her childhood, Pascale, who concealed until her fifties the abuse inflicted by her father, Sarah, whose ex-companion abused their granddaughter between 4 and 8 years old, and Joachim, who accuses his parents of incest, which they deny.
According to Ciivise (Independent Commission on Incest and Sexual Violence Against Children), 160,000 children are victims of sexual violence each year in France and 5.5 million adults were victims in their childhood, most often in within their family.
A situation that requires a “political and societal response”, pleaded Emmanuelle Béart.
