After 48 hours in police custody, Benoît Jacquot will be brought before the courts this Wednesday. Jacques Doillon, also accused by several actresses of sexual violence, was released without charge.
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09:29 – Benoît Jacquot presented to justice this Wednesday
After 48 hours in police custody, filmmaker Benoît Jacquot will be brought before the courts this Wednesday, AFP learned Tuesday evening from sources close to the case. The director is accused of sexual violence by several actresses, including Judith Godrèche who filed a complaint against him for rape with violence on a minor under 15 years old. Also summoned under the police custody regime, Jacques Doillon was released. The two filmmakers deny the accusations made against them by several actresses.
Directors Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon were taken into custody on July 1 and 2, 2024, summoned by the Brigade for the Protection of Minors. Benoît Jacquot is due to appear in court this Wednesday, while Jacques Doillon was released without charge. They both deny the accusations against them. Judith Godrèche accuses the former of “rape with violence of a minor under 15” and the latter of “rape of a minor under 15 by a person in authority”. The two septuagenarian directors have always denied these accusations.
Other actresses accuse the two filmmakers of sexual violence. Julia Roy, who starred in four of Benoît Jacquot’s films between 2016 and 2021, also filed a complaint against the filmmaker for sexual assault “in a context of violence and moral constraint that lasted several years.” Isild le Besco also filed a complaint at the end of May for rape of a minor over the age of 15 and rape, for acts that allegedly occurred between 1998 and 2007.
Like Benoît Jacquot, director Jacques Doillon is being questioned this Monday under police custody. He is accused of rape, sexual assault and harassment by several actresses, including Judith Godrèche, Anna Mouglalis and Isild Le Besco. The former says that the director allegedly “groped” her in an unplanned sex scene on the set of a film, when she was 15 years old. Isild Le Besco accuses Jacques Doillon of having made advances towards her in a professional context, while Anna Mouglalis says that the director allegedly kissed her by force at his home in 2011, on the sidelines of a film shoot.
Publicly, Judith Godrèche and Benoît Jacquot had a six-year “relationship” from 1986 to 1992. The actress was then 14 years old when she met the 39-year-old filmmaker at a casting for the film Beggars. On the set, they became closer to the point of forming, in everyone’s eyes at least, an official “couple”. But the broadcast of a documentary about the director, in which he assumes the “transgression” of his past relationship with the one who was then a teenager, was a trigger for the actress.
In these images, Benoît Jacquot says in particular “Yes, it was a transgression. If only in the eyes of the law (…) we don’t have the right in principle, I think. A girl like her who was indeed 15 years old, and I was 40, I didn’t have the right.” On January 8, 2024, Judith Godrèche named the director on her Instagram account for the first time: “The little girl in me can no longer keep quiet about this name. His name is Benoît Jacquot. He still manipulates those who could associate their names with mine. Testify. He threatens to take me to court for defamation.”
Since then, Judith Godrèche has denounced a “perversion” and a “control” exercised by the director, to the point of filing a complaint on February 6, 2024 for “rape with violence on a minor under 15 years old”. In her testimony to the Brigade for the Protection of Minors of the Paris Judicial Police, transcribed in Le Monde, the actress and director of Icon of French cinema says that she “would have liked Benoît to agree to be my friend, not to have me, I didn’t want his body”. “He disgusted me”, she adds. She also denounces a sometimes brutal sexual relationship with the filmmaker: “he tells me to take off my sweater, that we’re going to play a sex game. I have to stand on the stairs, with my back to him and close my eyes. He takes his belt, starts to whip me. I let him do one blow, two blows, but I can’t.” Today aged 77, Benoît Jacquot denies the accusations against him. In the columns of Le Monde, he speaks of a long “loving” relationship, “devoid according to him of brutality and predation”.
On February 6, 2024, Judith Godrèche also filed a complaint against Jacques Doillon for “rape of a minor under 15 by a person in authority.” On France Inter two days later, the actress recounted two assaults she said she had suffered at the hands of Jane Birkin’s ex-husband and father of Lou Doillon (in particular).
The first assault denounced by Judith Godrèche allegedly took place “in Jane Birkin’s house”. She would not give details to France Inter. The second assault allegedly took place on the set of the film The 15 year old girldirected by and starring the same Jacques Doillon. “All of a sudden, he decides that there is a love scene, a sex scene between him and me,” she explains on France Inter. “I take off my sweater, I’m topless, he gropes me, makes out with me” over 45 takes. She assures that the events took place in front of Jane Birkin, then still in a relationship with the director, for whom the “situation was extremely painful.”
Jacques Doillon has always denied the accusations against him and is considering filing a complaint against the 51-year-old actress for defamation. His lawyer also denounced “ignoble” remarks made by Judith Godrèche in a press release sent to AFP. In an interview with Le Parisien on Wednesday, April 10, he assured that he had “never had an intimate relationship with Judith Godrèche” and had “never been attracted to her”. “I was living at the time with Jane (Birkin, editor’s note), with whom I was in love. Nothing happened with Judith, neither in an office nor anywhere else,” he told the daily.
Judith Godrèche filed a complaint against Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon on February 6, 2024. The following day, an investigation was opened by the Paris prosecutor’s office on February 7, 2024. It specifically concerns “the offenses of rape of a minor under 15 by a person in authority, rape, violence by a cohabitant, and sexual assault of a minor over 15 by a person in authority, all of the facts reported having taken place between 1986 and 1992”. The investigations were entrusted to the Brigade for the Protection of Minors. The two directors were summoned on July 1, 2024 with a view to being placed in police custody.
While there is probably a statute of limitations, the facts of “rape with violence on a minor under 15 years of age” are punishable by 20 years in prison. For his part, Jacques Doillon intends to file a complaint for defamation against Judith Godrèche.
Following Judith Godrèche’s complaints, other actresses have spoken out against the two directors she denounces. Isild Le Besco denounces a controlling relationship exercised by Benoît Jacquot when she was 16 and having suffered “psychological or physical violence”. She also accuses Jacques Doillon of having refused her a role after she had refused his advances. Anna Mouglalis filed a complaint against Jacques Doillon and accuses him of having kissed her by force in a stairwell, on the fringes of the filming of the film A child of you in 2011.