“In my time the possibility of “no” did not exist.” In an interview with Mediapart on Monday evening, Judith Godrèche once again testified about the sexual assaults she claims to have suffered, when she was a minor, from Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon. Some thirty years after the alleged events, she explains her long silence by “the fact of not being ready to tell certain things, of not even realizing them”. “And then there is the fact that, anyway, whatever happens, even if you had been ready, the world doesn’t expect that from you,” she emphasizes. She speaks of the great family of French cinema as a “community which claims to have created you” and which would experience this speaking out as “a betrayal”.
Judith Godrèche compares her situation to that of a “woman-robot”, created by a man, who would like to escape. The 51-year-old director has sometimes felt trapped in this cinema environment which affirms: “You will not betray the world from which you come, this environment which saw you grow up and which considers that you belong to it”.
“Was this environment complicit?” asks Mediapart. “Yes,” she replies, “he was the driving force in crushing the word. (…) This idea of not betraying omerta is very, very strong,” she insists. She says she was afraid of being boycotted during the distribution of her series, Icon of French cinema, available in replay on Arte. Although Benoît Jacquot’s name was not mentioned once during the six episodes, she feared that the director’s influence would hinder her “possibility to create.” Along the way, she also invites journalists specializing in cinema, witnesses to what she experienced or what others may experience today, to examine their conscience.
Judith Godrèche denounces the “hierarchy on the sets”, the “divinization of the role of the director” which leads to a form of “megalomania”. “It silences dissonant voices,” she explains, because it is “a cinema that takes you to places that are very personal, which gives the feeling of participating in a work.”
The actress thus recalls the deep disgust “but impossible to formulate” that she felt for Jacques Doillon when, when she was only 15, the director, 24 years her senior, insisted on filming a scene with her of sex several dozen times, under the eyes of his wife, Jane Birkin. “How could I have thought that I had the right to say no in a situation where the adults seemed to be saying that what was happening was normal?” asks Judith Godrèche.
Judith Godrèche also launched on Sunday on social networks a call for testimony from victims of gender-based and sexual violence, from all walks of life. “I have a feeling of responsibility,” she explains. Because the actress has the impression of having “involuntarily encouraged young girls” to start relationships with older men, of having given the impression that it was “cool” through the films in which she was the heroine in the 1980s. Today she wants to open a safe space where young girls and young women could express themselves, send “an e-mail to get a foot in the door” and begin a path of awareness and reconstruction. “It is terrifying the number of victims, of people reduced to silence who live in environments where they do not know who to turn to, where they think that they are going to be erased from the face of the planet, that they will no longer be able to work.”
She acknowledges having taken this initiative as much for these women as for herself. “We do things for others, but we also do them for ourselves,” she confides. As I am privileged, I was lucky to have the Arte platform to write this series, people are a little more obliged to hear me. Today she wants to “find a solution to give the feeling” that she experienced when reading the messages of support that flooded into her Instagram account following her first speeches. “The love and support of women” have “revolutionized my perception of myself,” confides Judith Godrèche with emotion. “The idea of being several, of being numerous, is as if I were full of lots of little bits of women, and that gives me strength.”
