French actress Judith Godrèche filed a lawsuit in Paris for rape of a minor against director Benoît Jacquot, with whom she had a relationship as a teenager, her lawyer M told AFP on Wednesday.e Laure Heinich confirms information from the newspaper The world.
• Also read: Judith Godrèche denounces the “control” of director Benoît Jacquot
The actress filed a complaint on Tuesday about the rape of a 15-year-old minor by a person in charge of the youth protection brigade. These acts date back to the second half of the 1980s and may have been ordered.
According to Le Monde, the 77-year-old French filmmaker “strongly denies the accusations and allegations made by Judith Godrèche.” When asked by AFP on Wednesday, he said he did not want to respond further and would stick to these statements.
The 51-year-old actress recently discussed this relationship with the filmmaker, who is 25 years her senior, in the series “Icon of French Cinema” on ARTE. Their affair began in the spring of 1986, when she was just 14, and ended in the early 1990s.
Ms Godrèche, who had never taken the director to court before, denounced on social networks at the beginning of January the support he enjoys in the cinema industry.
“His name is Benoît Jacquot. He still manipulates those who might associate her name with mine. Bear your testimony. He is threatening to take me to court for defamation,” she said, believing that the filmmaker, who has never hidden his attraction to very young actresses, is “appreciated for his perversion.”
The reason for his statement was the viewing of a documentary from 2011 in which Benoît Jacquot recognized the illegality of his relationship with a teenager.
Before the investigators, according to Me Heinich, also denounced Judith Godrèche, exposed in “Les mendiants” by Benoît Jacquot (1988) and then “La disenchantée” (1990).
The filmmaker has built his work around actresses, stars like Isabelle Huppert or beginners like Isild Le Besco. “I can only film an actress if I am in love with her,” he said in the newspaper Le Figaro in 2009.
This complaint comes in the wake of numerous allegations of the #MeToo movement in French cinema, which in recent weeks has targeted other important figures of the seventh French art.
Gérard Depardieu, accused of rape since the end of 2020, was therefore pilloried for sequences filmed in North Korea in 2018 and broadcast in December on France 2's “Complément d'investigation” program, where he appeared in the speech women repeatedly say misogynistic and offensive things.