Speaking on France Inter radio earlier this month, Godrèche said that she was never attracted to Jacquot, “but I ended up with him, in his bed, and I was his child wife.” Godrèche and Jacquot met in 1986 on the set of his film “The Beggars.”“I was indoctrinated, it was as if I’d joined a cult,” she said. The relationship was marred by violence, confinement and control, she said.Hours before the ceremony, French cultural minister Rachida Dati criticized the country’s cinema for “collectively turning a blind eye for decades” to sexual violence. She hailed Godrèche’s courage to speak out and for sharing her traumatic experience.Judith Godrèche has spoken of her pain in simple terms, Dati said. “She said, I was a child. You saw everything and no one said anything,” the cultural minister said in an interview with The French Film magazine. She added: “This should be the beginning of profound soul searching for French cinema.”“There is no impunity in the name of art,” Dati said. “Creative freedom is total, but we are not talking about art here, but about a crime against a child,” she added. “Having a sexual relationship with a child under 15, is a crime.”Godrèche had previously spoken about her relationship with Jacquot, without naming him, in an autobiographical television show called “Icon of French Cinema” that was released in December.She was among the actors who spoke out in 2017 against U.S. film producer Harvey Weinstein amid the #MeToo movement, accusing him of sexual assault when she was 24.Jacquot told the Le Monde newspaper that he “doesn’t feel directly concerned” by Godrèche’s accusations, with whom he said he fell in love at the time. He denied any abuse of authority.In a statement to international news agency Agence France-Presse, Doillon said “the just cause doesn’t justify arbitrary denunciations, false accusations and lies.”Following Godrèche’s accusations, other women decided to speak out.Isild Le Besco, 41, accused Jacquot of “psychological and physical violence” in a relationship with him that began when she was 16 and he was 52. She also accused Doillon of having picked someone else for a role she was supposed to get because she refused his sexual advances.Another actor, Anna Mouglalis, 45, accused Doillon of sexual assault in 2011.The French film industry earlier was shaken by sexual misconduct accusations against actor Gérard Depardieu.In 2020, protests by women’s rights activists were staged during the Cesar Awards ceremony as director Roman Polanski won, in absentia, the best director award. Actor Adèle Haenel, who denounced alleged sexual assault by another French director in the early 2000s when she was 15, got up and walked out of the room.Polanski is still wanted in the United States decades after he was charged with raping a 13-year-old girl in 1977.
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