what the messages that the actor sent to the teenager reveal

The actor and director Philippe Caubère, known in particular for having played Marcel Pagnol’s father in the film The glory of my father, is targeted by a new investigation, according to information from franceinfo, opened for “sexual assault on a minor over 15 years old by a person in authority”.

Now aged 27, Camille* filed a complaint against him a year ago. She denounces sexual abuse when she was 16 years old and the actor Philippe Caubère, 61. A high school student, she did theater and dreamed of making it her career. A friend of his mother, a director, invites him to attend a work session which consists of a script reading. On this occasion, the latter introduced him to Philippe Caubère. Very quickly, the actor, 45 years her senior, asks her for her number, sends her text messages, invites her to come see her on stage then to join him at his home to talk theater. There, he offers her DVDs of his stage performances and the films in which he has appeared. He also gives him the book he wrote: The Notebooks of a Young Man 1976-1981where he talks about his sex life.

His “little darling” to whom he confided his sexual acts

The meetings do not take place at the actor’s main home, but at the studio he owns in Saint-Mandé in Val-de-Marne and which he considers as a place of refuge and work. Quickly, the relationship changes. The actor begins to call Camille, his “little sweetheart“. The young woman does not know what behavior to adopt in response. Sometimes, she gets caught up in the game. Sometimes, she becomes afraid and paralyzes herself. She accuses him today of having abused her candor and her emotional immaturity during lasting a year. The young woman also mentions kisses, then fellatio and sometimes brutal penetrations on the part of a man “impulsive” who reacted “according to his wishes”.

Camille also remembers that the actor made her the confidant of his sexual acts with his wife and other mistresses, including another minor, a 17-year-old girl whom he presented to him as very jealous of her.

She specifies in her complaint that Philippe Caubère had asked her to keep their relationship clandestine, and especially not to speak about it to her mother, because he knew her and even maintained a more than ambiguous relationship with her. The actor would have made sure to only bring the teenager into his studio on weekends when she was at her father’s house. The high school student’s parents shared her custody every other week, and her father was, she remembers, much more permissive when it came to outings. Philippe Caubère would have taken after these meetings the habit of paying for a taxi for young Camille early in the morning so that she could return to her father’s house.

“Childish eroticism”

Throughout the relationship, the man multiplies the messages which may suggest that Camille’s young age particularly attracted him. “You kissed and sucked me like a grown-up, like a woman, not at all like a child”he wrote in April 2012. He also talks about his “childish eroticism” or concludes one of his messages with “I love you, my kid.”.

Camille, during this relationship, developed eating disorders and obsessive-compulsive cleanliness disorders. The young woman explains that it was difficult to put an end to this relationship in September 2012, and that she continued to receive invitations over the following years, as did her mother, from Philipe Caubère for his various performances. It was only five years after the events she denounced that Camille confided that she had sufficient maturity to realize what she had suffered and the link with her psychological suffering.

Sexual abuse of minors: authority rather than consent

The complaint that the young woman filed a year ago is not a complaint for rape but for sexual assault of a minor over 15 years old. This offense, punishable at the time of the events by two years in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros, involves authority, de jure or de facto. For the young woman’s lawyer, Me Negar Haeri, “there was a de facto authority between Mr. Caubère and Camille, a hold due to the intellectual influence of the actor”. He was a figure in French theater for 40 years, respected by the profession and the public. She, as a teenager, admired his work and his career and would have liked to make him a mentor, a spiritual father. The notion of authority is major in a case of sexual assault on a minor over 15 years old where the notion of consent, however, is not important.

In 2018, when the actress Solveig Halloin filed a complaint for rape against Philippe Caubère (a complaint later dismissed due to lack of evidence), she spoke about Camille to the police, who contacted the young woman by two-person telephone call. times. She told them that she had never been the victim of violence from the actor. It was only six years later that she decided to take legal action. In a press release published Tuesday January 9 by his lawyer Marie Dosé, Philippe Caubère “confirms having maintained an intimate relationship with this young woman, while she was a minor (between 16 and 17 years old)”. He adds : “the significant age difference between her and me should have led me not to enter into such a relationship”.

“I have always had a very free sexual and sentimental life”

When the first complaint against him was announced in 2018, he responded to franceinfo and explained that he had a “very free sexual and sentimental life“.

“I have always had a very free sexual and sentimental life, I play it in my shows, I make no secret of it, just as I have never hidden the fact that I was a client of prostitutes for a long time but rape is ‘is another matter’

Philippe Caubère in 2018

on franceinfo

Philippe Caubère was also one of the signatories of the forum in 2013 “Don’t touch my whore! The manifesto of the 343 bastards”published in the magazine Causeur against the abolition of prostitution.

The man who was one of the pillars of Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil in the 1970s also put his name on December 25 at the bottom of the column in support of Gérard Depardieu published in Le Figaroafter the show “Complément d’investigation” where we see him making sexual comments about a ten-year-old girl.

In the case between him and Camille, an investigation has been open for a year. The actor was to be interviewed and confronted by the complainant last June. This hearing was postponed at the request of his lawyer, “for medical and professional reasons”, as important shows approach for him. Seven months later, the hearing has still not been rescheduled. “This investigation is still ongoing”comments soberly on the Créteil floor.

Since the revelations about the investigation targeting him, Philippe Caubère has seen his 2024 tour slightly modified. It remains announced next January 27 in Nyons in the Drôme in the show “The stars”. But the director of Cratère, the national stage of Alès, announced Wednesday January 10 during his greeting ceremony that Philippe Caubère who was to play there on January 30 and 31 will ultimately not give any performance. Its dates at the beginning of February in Ganges and Allègre-les-Fumades are also canceled.

*The first name has been changed.