Hearing before the Senate this Thursday, February 29, actress Judith Godrèche requested the opening of a commission of inquiry and demanded political responses to sexual violence committed in French cinema.
Judith Godreche brings the subject of sexual violence in cinema to Parliament. The actress who filed a complaint against directors Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon for rape of minors was heard by the Senate women’s rights delegation this Thursday, February 29. The hearing, the first conducted with an actress and representative of the world of cinema, is being held less than a week after the speech given by the actress on the stage of the 2024 Césars and in which she denounced “illicit trafficking in Girls”.
The actress, who has become the leading figure of this new act of #MeToo in France, gives the movement a political dimension by going before the Senate. She also did not fail to highlight the silence of the cultural sector, but also that of politics through its lack of intervention to prevent these abuses. “Everyone knew and yet every time you lose our backpacks, they contained so many diaries with golden locks. How many little feet in the door will it take before this society reacts forever? Without our childhood stolen from us?”, Judith Godrèche told the senators. And the actress added: “Will you pretend not to have heard me? Like cinema does, sometimes, without fanfare or trumpet”, underlining the silence that Emmanuel Macron has already demonstrated towards denunciations of sexual violence. A reference to a document written by the 50/50 collective addressed to the Head of State several years ago, which she read before the Senate, and which provoked “no reaction”.
A commission of inquiry and protective measures required
Before the Senate, Judith Godrèche called for the opening of a commission of inquiry into sexual violence in cinema to assess the extent of the phenomenon. “Everyone knows that in the film industry, an attacker disguised as a director makes little girls cry for real,” she said. But above all, the actress proposed first measures of protection for minor actors: the obligatory presence of a “neutral referent on the set, who is trained in psychology and independent of the production” so that a “child is not never left alone on set”, or the presence of an “intimacy coach” for intimate scenes and an “acting coach” different from the director for the young actors.
The actress who publicly denounced abuses by two filmmakers also requested the removal of Dominique Boutonnat, current president of the National Center for Cinema and Animated Images, from his post. The man was indicted for sexual assault and attempted rape after a complaint from his 22-year-old godson filed in October 2020. “Go for training against sexual violence inside the building of an institution whose president himself is accused of sexual violence… What is this joke?” asked Judith Godrèche.
An “important” testimony in a “political battle”
Judith Godrèche has challenged the Senate several times and even urged it, but more broadly the political world, to act: “This battle is political because today with education, we obtain nothing”. Calls heard by certain parliamentarians such as centrist senator Dominique Vérien who encouraged the actress to speak before the Senate: “We need you”. “Hearing her testimony is important, because the members of the delegation are working to ensure that the situations of violence against minors that she describes no longer happen and are punished,” the parliamentarian explained last week on Public Senate. Today, she assures: “We are calling for a start, it is no longer possible to turn a blind eye.”