Actress Sarah Grappin accuses director Alain Corneau of sexual assault and rape when she was a teenager

The actress describes in “L’Obs” a relationship of influence which began on the set of “New World” in 1994. She was then 15 years old and the French director, 52 years old.

He called her “my princess”. Actress Sarah Grappin revealed, Wednesday February 14, to The Obs, a controlling relationship maintained with the director Alain Corneau in the 1990s, when she was a teenager. She says it all started during rehearsals for the film. The new World in 1994, when she was only 15 and he was 52.

Between two management trucks, the French director, who won a César in 1992 for All the mornings of the world, would have asked him “Do you want to kiss me?” she says. Subsequently, he would have taken him to cafes, cinemas, restaurants, and would have arranged to meet him at his home in Paris.

A relationship that lasted a year and a half

This relationship would have lasted a year and a half. A period during which Sarah Grappin describes rape and sexual assault at the hands of the director. “Once, he greeted me in an Indian sari, he sat cross-legged and put me astride him. He penetrated me with his fingers from the front, from the back, and he said that we ‘wouldn’t go any further.’ She also describes two other times, in her car, of digital penetrations. Contacted by The ObsAlain Corneau’s former wife, Nadine Trintignant, refutes these accusations. “This is all ridiculous (…) I don’t want people to say anything, especially about my husband, who is dead and can no longer defend himself.”

Sarah Grappin explains that she is speaking out after the revelations made by Judith Godrèche on the relationship she experienced with the director Benoît Jacquot, when she was 14 and he was 39. She also says that Alain Corneau told her : “You are not the only one to experience this, it happened to Judith Godrèche”.

Thirty years later, she expressed: “I told myself a great love story to survive. The work of recent years has been to come out of denial”, she relates. After the director’s death in 2010, Sarah Grappin continued: “I understood that day that I would have no real reparation, that he would never come to apologize, that I would never be able to talk to him about it.”