“His name is Benoît Jacquot.” In an Instagram story published on Saturday, actress Judith Godrèche publicly named director Benoît Jacquot to denounce the “control” he had over her when she was a teenager. “The little girl in me can no longer keep silent about this name,” she wrote in her message. The actress had already revealed that she had a relationship at the age of 14 with a filmmaker who was then 40 years old, during the release of her series Icon of French Cinema broadcast on Arte in December. But she never mentioned his name.
She is speaking this time after images resurfaced from a documentary directed by Gérard Miller in 2011, The Ruses of Desire: The Interdit. Benoît Jacquot spoke without any embarrassment about his relationship with his young actress, affirming that “it excited him a lot”. “I would probably never have expressed myself in such a personal way on these networks if this documentary had not fallen before my eyes,” she wrote on Instagram, before addressing the French filmmaker directly. “No, Benoît Jacquot, a girl like her was 14 years old, and no, that didn’t excite him.” These last words are accompanied by a screenshot of the documentary where she appears, aged 14. “That’s no, no, no,” says Judith Godrèche again.
The actress says she is “afraid” when writing these words, “of no longer working, of not being supported”. She claims that the director threatened to “take her to court for defamation”, and calls on Internet users to massively relay her post on social networks.
In 1988, Judith Godrèche met the director on the set of his film Les Mendiants, in which she landed her first major role. He is 40 years old, she has just turned 14. The relationship lasted almost 6 years. “As an actress, you need to be loved and looked at. It’s as if, by choosing you, the director gives you life,” she explained in December in an interview with Elle magazine.
