Judith Godrèche has announced that she is filing a complaint against the director Benoît Jacquot for “violent rape of a minor under the age of 15”, denouncing the “control” that the filmmaker exercised over her.
“It’s a story like the stories of children who are kidnapped and who grow up without seeing the world and who cannot think ill of their captor.” It is through these words, reported in the columns of World, that the actress Judith Godrèche described “the influence” that Benoît Jacquot had over her. She filed a complaint on February 6 against the director of farewell to the Queen And The disenchanted for the acts of “violent rape of a minor under 15 years of age”. Although there is probably a statute of limitations in this specific case, this crime is punishable by 20 years in prison.
Since the release of his series on Arte, Icon of French Cinema, the 51-year-old actress lifts the veil on the relationship she had with the filmmaker, when she was 14 and he was 39. She now denounces a relationship of “perversion” and “control”. The director, now 77 years old, denies the accusations against him and instead evokes a “loving” and long relationship, “devoid, according to him, of brutality and predation” specifies Le Monde.
“He disgusted me”
Judith Godreche met Benoît Jacquot in 1986, when she was 14 years old, during a casting call to play a role in Beggars. They became closer during filming and maintained an official “relationship” known to everyone for six years.
The actress describes the domination exercised by the actor and a complicated sexuality with him, in particular brutality and acts of violence in her preparatory text for her hearing before the minor protection brigade of the Paris judicial police, retransmitted by Le Monde.
In her testimony, Judith Godrèche says that she “would have wanted Benoît to agree to be my friend, to not have me, I did not 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 are going to play a sexual 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.”
Decades of silence
It has been several weeks since Judith Godrèche spoke out to denounce what she suffered on social networks, after decades of silence. The broadcast of a documentary on the director, where he assumes the “transgression” of his past relationship with the teenager, was the trigger. Benoît Jacquot said in these images in particular: “Yes, it was a transgression. If only in terms of 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.”
On January 8, 2024, Judith Godrèche denounced the filmmaker for the first time by naming him on her Instagram account: “The little girl in me can no longer keep silent about this name. His name is Benoît Jacquot. He still manipulates those who could associate their names to mine. Testify. He threatens to take me to court for defamation.”