Rape of minors | Judith Godrèche files complaint against filmmaker Benoît Jacquot

(Paris) French actress Judith Godrèche filed a complaint in Paris for rape of a minor against director Benoît Jacquot, with whom she had a relationship when she was a teenager, and an investigation was opened, the court said on Wednesday.

The actress filed a complaint on Tuesday for rape of a 15-year-old minor by a person in authority at the Minor Protection Brigade for these facts dating from the second half of the 1980s, and possibly prescribed, her lawyer told AFP on Wednesday. M^e Laure Heinich, confirming information from the newspaper The world.

A preliminary investigation was opened following his complaint, the Paris prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday, requested by AFP.

The investigation “concerns the offenses of rape of a minor under 15 years old by a person in authority, rape, violence by a partner, and sexual assault on a minor over 15 years old by a person in authority, all of the facts denounced having taken place between 1986 and 1992,” added the public prosecutor, specifying that the investigations were entrusted to the Minors Protection Brigade.

According to The world, the 77-year-old French filmmaker, “firmly denies the allegations and accusations of Judith Godrèche”. Asked by AFP, he said on Wednesday that he did not wish to react further, sticking to these statements.

The actress, 51, had recently mentioned this relationship with the filmmaker 25 years her senior in the series Icon of French cinema on Arte. Their affair would have started in the spring of 1986, when she was just 14 years old, and would have ended in the early 1990s.

M^me Godrèche, who until then had never taken the director to court, denounced at the beginning of January on social networks the support he enjoys in the cinema industry.

“His name is Benoît Jacquot. He still manipulates those who might associate their names with mine. Bear witness. He threatens to take me to court for defamation,” she said, estimating that the filmmaker, who has never hidden his attraction to very young actresses, is “esteemed for his perversion.”

His speaking out was motivated by the viewing of a documentary dated 2011 where Benoît Jacquot recognized the illegal nature of his relationship with a teenager.

Before the investigators, Judith Godrèche, revealed in Beggars by Benoit Jacquot (1988) then The disenchanted (1990), also denounced violence during this relationship, according to M^e Heinich.

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 2009 in the newspaper Le Figaro.

This complaint comes in the wake of numerous accusations from the #metoo of French cinema which have targeted other important personalities of the 7 in recent weeks^e French art.

Gérard Depardieu, indicted for rape since the end of 2020, was thus pilloried for sequences filmed in 2018 in North Korea, broadcast in the show Further investigation from France 2 in December, where he made multiple misogynistic and insulting remarks while addressing women.