The directors, aged 77 and 80 respectively, are the subject of complaints from several actresses, including Judith Godrèche and Isild Le Besco. Both men dispute the facts.
They arrived on Monday, July 1st at around 9:30 a.m. at the regional headquarters of the judicial police in Paris. Filmmakers Benoît Jacquot, 77, and Jacques Doillon, 80, accused of sexual violence by several actresses, were taken into custody to the juvenile protection brigade. Jacques Doillon was released without charge on Tuesday evening, his lawyer, Marie Dosé, announced to AFP. Benoît Jacquot’s police custody, however, continued.
An investigation was opened in February by the Paris prosecutor’s office, in particular for rape of a minor under 15 by a person in authority, following Judith Godrèche’s complaint against the two directors. “I’m crying. (…) I don’t know if I have the strength but I will have it. I will have it, I will have it”commented the actress and director on Instagram Monday morning, suggesting a confrontation with those in custody. Asked by franceinfo, the Paris prosecutor’s office did not confirm this element.
Benoît Jacquot is the first to have been accused in this case. A “long journey” for Judith Godrèche, who started with her series French cinema iconreleased in December 2023 on Arte, in which she evokes without naming the relationship of“grip” and of “perversion” maintained with the director from 1986 to 1992. In January, after seeing a video resurface in which Benoît Jacquot claims that this relationship “excited a lot” The actress, then aged “15 years” when he had some “40”Judith Godrèche decides to denounce him publicly, then to file a complaint.
In an interview with Worldthe actress recounts her experience, which she compares to that “children who are kidnapped (…) and who cannot think ill of their captor”. Assuring that their story began when she was 14 and not 15, she testifies toa relationship of domination, made up of psychological and physical violence and “rough sex”.
“I am completely isolated. He has cut me off from all social life. (…) The last year has become absolute hell, he is violent, he hits me.”
Judith Godrèche, on the subject of Benoît Jacquotin the world”
Despite the age of the facts, the Paris prosecutor’s office opened an investigation in February “rape of a minor under 15 by a person in authority, rape, violence by a cohabitant, and sexual assault of a minor over 15 by a person in authority.”
The aim is in particular to discover the existence of other victims for whom the facts are not prescribed, as recommended by a circular on the fight against violence against minors. Benoît Jacquot, for his part, denies these accusations. After he was taken into custody, his lawyer Julia Minkowski reacted by stating that the filmmaker was going to “finally being able to express oneself before the courts”denouncing a “ultra-mediatization” and deploring “dysfunctions of justice”.
Caught up in the #MeToo wave that has swept through French cinema since Judith Godrèche spoke out, the heir to the New Wave is accused by four other actresses of violence and sexual harassment. In The worldJulia Roy, Vahina Giocante, Isild Le Besco and Laurence Cordier describe the behavior of a director who took advantage of his aura and his position to exert influence over them.
Two of them, Julia Roy and Isild Le Besco, have turned to justice. The facts reported concerning them are more recent. The firstwho starred in four of his films between 2016 and 2021, filed a complaint for sexual assault. In The worldthe actress, who met Benoît Jacquot at the age of 23, describes a six-year relationship during which the director “wanted to control everything I did. When I confronted him about his verbal and physical abuse, he would deflect everything, pretending none of it had happened.” Facts, again, contested by the filmmaker, who justifies himself as follows: “There is violence in romantic relationships. I am not special or exceptional. But since I make films, it takes on exceptional proportions.”
After sending a text to the newspaper, in which she mentions “psychological or physical violence”, actress and director Isild Le Besco, who made six films with Benoît Jacquot, including Sade when she was 16 and he was 62, he explains himself at greater length in a book, Say true.
“To say that Benoît raped me is obvious. (…) I was a teenager and I gave him my complete trust. He replaced my father, my mother, any figure of authority. In this, his rape is also incestuous.”
Isild Le Bescoin his book “Tell the truth”
In May, she decided to file a complaint in turn. for acts of rape of a minor over 15 years old between 1998 and 2007. Speaking to France 2, she denounced a “rape of the mind above all.”
In this wave of liberation of speech, Jacques Doillon, another heir of the New Wave, is also accused of sexual violence. If she did not file a complaint against him, Isild le Besco denounced, still in The worlda form of sexual blackmail from the filmmaker in 2000, when she hoped to star in the film Right Westreleased the following year. “When I refused to sleep with him, he removed me from the project and gave the role to his daughter”she accuses. Her testimony supports that of Judith Godrèche, who revealed on France Inter, at the beginning of February, that she had been abused by the director of Rodin, Pony Or The Little Criminal.
Judith Godrèche first describes the events that took place “in Jane’s house [Birkin, compagne à l’époque du cinéaste]in Jacques Doillon’s office”. “No one saw it and I didn’t tell anyone.”she says. She also talks about the filming of the movie The Fifteen Year Old Girlreleased in 1989. “All of a sudden he decides that there is a love scene, a sex scene between him and me”reports the actress, explaining that “45 takes” were made for this scene. “I take off my sweater, I’m shirtless, he gropes me, makes out with me”she describes. The complaint she filed against Benoît Jacquot also targets Jacques Doillon.
Actress Anna Mouglalis also testified in The world against the filmmaker. She recounts a sexual assault of which she accuses the director “in the summer of 2011″ in the Uzès region (Gard). “One evening after dinner, there were only two of us left in the room. It was in the stairwell on the landing that gave onto my daughter’s room and mine where I was going to join Samuel [Benchetrit, son compagnon à l’époque] who had gone to bed earlier. He kissed me forcefully and I “rejected”she assures.
In a statement to AFP, Jacques Doillon denies these allegations. “That Judith Godrèche, and other women through her, are keen to denounce a system, an era, a society, is courageous, commendable and necessary. But the justice of the cause does not authorize arbitrary denunciations, false accusations and lies.”he wrote. On Judith’s accusations Godrèche, he retorts that the scene in question was “in the original screenplay. (…) Judith Godrèche obviously read and reread the screenplay since she even claimed to have written it”. A few days later, Jacques Doillon announced that he was filing a defamation complaint against the actress and director. A decision that followed a message on Instagram in which she wrote: “In 2022, this newspaper writes that Doillon’s specialty is filming with children. One sentence is missing: ‘Who he sleeps with’.”
“To dare to publicly assert, as she did again on February 21, that he had ‘slept with children’ who appeared in his films is despicable and beyond comprehension.”denounces the filmmaker’s lawyer, Marie Dosé. After her client was placed in police custody, she considered that he “should have been heard in the context of a free hearing in view of the age of the facts, their statute of limitations acquired for more than two decades, and the inevitable dismissal without further action which will close this investigation”.