Four years after the start of the #MeToo movement, the wave reached the theatrical world in France to “bring down the masks”.
It took eight years for Alice to have the courage to file a complaint against a renowned French director, whom she accuses of having raped her when she was a 20-year-old student actress.
“It happened in 2012. I suffered from post-traumatic amnesia,” this ex-actress, now in her thirties, told AFP. “It wasn’t until 2016 that it came back to me, and even today, memories keep coming back to me. “
Alice had testified in early October for an investigation of the daily Release, in which several women claim to have suffered harassment and sexual violence from Michel Didym, actor and former director of the National Dramatic Center of Nancy, now 63 years old.
He disputes the facts and is the subject of a preliminary investigation.
Subsequently, a call for testimonies on Twitter from a theater blogger, who had accused an actor of the Comédie-Française of rape, had a snowball effect: a collective # MeTooThéâtre was born, and an open letter calling for a national survey in the community and for a code of ethics in performing arts schools was signed by nearly 1,500 people. Among them are the actress Adèle Haenel, who has become a symbol of the fight against harassment and sexual assault in France, actresses of the Comédie-Française, such as Marina Hands, women politicians and feminist activists.
“We need actions”
“We have learned through our teachers to conform to the“ desire of the director ” […], which it was absolutely necessary to encourage to determine our future hiring. We have learned everything. Unless you say no, ”underlines the forum.
On Saturday, some 300 people demonstrated in Paris to denounce “the omerta”.
“Our anger is not a French comedy,” read a sign. “The anger got stuck too long,” says Alice, present at the demonstration.
It was in November 2020 that she filed a complaint against Michel Didym, after writing to the Nancy prosecutor. And after having gathered for six months about twenty testimonies of his former comrades at the Conservatory of Nancy.
“There is no point in filing a complaint and being alone,” she said, assuring that harassment is “a systemic problem in the theater”. “There is the presumption of innocence for the aggressors, but not the presumption of truth for the victims”. Beyond the liberation of speech, she wants “deeds”.
The mobilization has so far caused two theaters to react: in Lyon, the Théâtre des Célestins has decided to postpone a show by Michel Didym, and the Théâtre 14 in Paris has undertaken to put in place “tools” to “protect , listen and support ”.
The elected ecologist to the Council of Paris Alice Coffin calls to stop funding “structures that do not offer a fight plan”.
“Naked in her bath”
Blogger Marie Coquille-Chambel launched a call for testimonials in early October that has gone viral. “I was raped by a 45-year-old actor when I was 16,” says a testimony.
“I’m 23 and have a professional meeting with a 60-year-old director. He is naked in his bath when I arrive and invites me to join him. I close the door humiliated ”, wrote on Twitter the actress Céline Langlois, member of the collective # MeTooThéâtre.
“We were afraid to speak for a long time. But there is a problem, ”she told Agence France-Presse. A fed up with “the mythology of the actress as a light woman, of the injunction to be young and beautiful until death, and of the under-representation of women in management positions”.
“It’s an inclusive movement, there are also men who are victims of sexual violence in the community,” she adds.
For the sociologist Laetitia César-Franquet, of the Center Émile Durkheim, the “delay of movement in the theater comes from the precariousness of the environment, with this fear of losing roles” if we speak.
She also points to the “spectator effect”: “if I witness violence and the majority does not intervene, I will do like the others”. And in this environment, “there is a certain standard that we can do with the body what we want”, develops this specialist in the sociology of gender and violence against women.