One Saturday in January, Judith Godrèche was expected at a dinner party, but she couldn't get out of bed. Shivering from the cold when it was warm in her room, she rushed to the bathroom and, according to her account, vomited. The actress was in a state of shock. She had just watched an excerpt from a documentary by the psychoanalyst Gérard Miller that had been posted on social media, in which a French filmmaker talks about his cinematic practice as "illicit trafficking in minors," the jealousy of his peers when he consummates his young actresses, and his "Bluebeard" syndrome.

The minute-long clip of Miller's interview with Benoît Jacquot swept away the last vestiges of Godrèche's restraint, which had been crumbling for decades but was necessary to prevent the mental intrusion of sexual trauma, to protect the 14-year-old she had been when she was under the domination of then 39-year-old Jacquot. Everything came flooding back, her mental and physical battles with this man, almost three times her age at the time, who descended on her as a teenager. What was the meaning of this relationship? Was it love or predatory behavior? At the age of 51, Godrèche finally ripped off the last protective veil, a few weeks after the broadcast of a TV show she produced for Arte, Icon of French Cinema, in which she began to evoke her youth, without saying everything.

"It's like the stories of children who are kidnapped and grow up without seeing the world, and who can't think ill of their captor. I wanted Benoît to be my friend, not to have me, I didn't want his body. Very quickly, he disgusted me," she wrote in a preparatory text for her hearing, on Tuesday, February 6, before the Minors' Protection Brigade of the Paris Judicial Police. There, the actress requested an appointment to lodge a complaint for "rape with violence on a minor under 15" committed by a person in authority – a crime punishable by 20 years' imprisonment, although her case is probably outside the statute of limitations.

Not a good victim

Interviewed by Le Monde, Jacquot denies all these accusations and insists on the "loving" nature of their long relationship, devoid in his view of brutality and predation. One of the sons of the New Wave, the now 77-year-old director is a major figure in French independent cinema and has authored some 30 films. In 2013, his film Les Adieux à la Reine (Farewell, My Queen) won three César prizes.

The week before she filed the complaint, Godrèche had gone to her lawyer's office, her shoulder weighed down by her bag filled with dozens of books, photos, magazines, and letters she was bringing as evidence. She laid everything on the desk. "Do you really think we don't believe you?" asked Laure Heinich, the lawyer. The question triggered a torrent of tears, so much so that Heinich had to leave the room for her to regain her composure. "It was the first time in my whole life that I cried for myself, for the abused child that I had been," she told Le Monde.

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