For a long time, she kept her story quiet. By reappropriating it in the form of an autofiction, Judith Godrèche, considered one of the great actresses of her generation before disappearing from the radar, has become the unexpected voice of #MeToo in French cinema.
Again on Monday on the French investigative site Mediapart, she was crushing the middle of the 7e art and its generalized “omerta”, “driving force in the crushing of speech” in the face of the influence and sexual violence that she says she experienced, as a minor, from the directors Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon, and that she decided to speak out after decades of silence.
She also created an email address to collect testimonies from other victims.
“I understand it’s time to tell my story. For you, for all those who live in imposed silence,” she explains in a letter to one of her two children, her daughter Tess, 18, published on February 7 by the newspaper The world.
For around ten days, the 51-year-old actress, former muse of auteur cinema, has been carrying out interviews in which she calls into question French cinema which is experiencing its “#MeToo moment”, according to several Anglo-Saxon media evoking also the accusations of sexual violence targeting Gérard Depardieu.
Child actress
This is thanks to the writing of the six-episode series Icon of French Cinema, broadcast at the end of December on the Franco-German channel Arte and since available in replay, Judith Godrèche was able to speak out, thereby marking her return to the screen.
She portrays her fictional double, an actress exiled in the United States who no longer finds roles upon her return to France. A single mother, she is obsessed with protecting her teenage daughter from potential predators.
This character is also and above all a 14-year-old child under the influence of a forty-year-old director who haunts the series but whose true identity she conceals.
It is a video broadcast on social networks which shows Benoît Jacquot, 77 years old, speaking with complete impunity about his relationships with very young girls which has since led her to publicly display the name of the man with whom she lived from 1986 — she was 14 at the time and was emancipated at 16 — until the early 1990s.
On February 7, she filed a complaint against him for “violent rape” of a minor under 15 years old.
A few days later, she accused another director, Jacques Doillon, 79, of sexual violence. ” All of a sudden, [Doillon] decides that there is a love scene, a sex scene between him and me. I take off my sweater, I’m shirtless, he gropes me, makes out with me,” she told France Inter radio. The director denies it, speaking of “lies”.
Erasure
Judith Godrèche began her career at the age of 12 with a film by Nadine Trintignant Next summerbefore crossing paths with Benoît Jacquot, who offered him a role in Beggars in 1988 then The disenchanted in 1990. In 1989, she toured The fifteen year old girl with Jacques Doillon.
Talented, hardworking, she made a place for herself in the industry. Nearly ten years later, she opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in The Man in the Iron Mask.
The years pass and the woman who shared the lives of comedians Maurice Barthélemy and Dany Boon almost disappears from the screens. She puts this erasure down to the weight of silence.
In 2020, reading the Consent by Vanessa Springora, on the influence imposed on her by the writer Gabriel Matzneff, 35 years her senior, upsets her and fuels her desire to recount her own experience.
Three years earlier, she denounced in the New York Timesthe actions of film producer Harvey Weinstein.
“I attacked a lot of established things,” she said on the France 5 television channel, citing both media (Cinema notebooks, Telerama) as institutions like the National Cinema Center (CNC) or even the State.
Will she ever be able to work for this industry again? She wonders.