VIDEO. “Making cinema is a kind of cover-up”: when Benoît Jacquot claimed his sexual relations with minors

Benoît Jacquot en 2011. Judith Godrèche en 2024. L'Interdit/Gérard Miller/Quotidien

Images from a documentary made in 2011 show Benoît Jacquot boasting about his adventures with teenage girls. Seeing these relationships, some of which would now be qualified as the misappropriation of minors, as "privileges" of filmmakers. 

His speech is chilling. In a documentary directed by Gérard Miller, "L'Interdit", Benoît Jacquot spoke in 2011 of his relationships with teenage girls. 

In the midst of the Depardieu affair and the story of actress Judith Godrèche on her relationship with the director of the film Les Mendiants, other names emerge: Virgine Ledoyen and Isild Le Besco would also have had a relationship with Benoît Jacquot when they were minors.

Leçon d’impunité par l’agresseur. Il faut aller jusqu’à la dernière phrase pour en saisir tout la perversité. Benoît Jacquot interrogé par Gérard Miller dans « l’interdît » 2011 pic.twitter.com/L2LifJx12a

— Devynck Hélène (@DevynckH) January 6, 2024

"It excited him a lot"

"Yes, it's definitely a transgression", we hear the director respond to the journalist who questions him about his relationship with Judith Godrèche, when she was 14 and he was 40.

"I don’not know any more, if only with regard to the law, as it is said, we do not have the right in principle, I believe. So a girl like her, like this Judith, who was in fact 14 years old, I in principle, at 40, had no right, I don't think so. It excited her a lot" then asks the director, who imagines that this relationship could actually not be "legal". 

An assumed attraction to minors

"For once, Judith Godrèche has defied my desire, but like a very young woman can do it, I believe. A woman more advanced in her time, in her age, to my knowledge, would never have proceeded like this" explains Benoît Jacquot. 

Apart from Judith Godrèche, Benoît Jacquot had relationships with Isild Le Besco and Virginie Ledoyen, even though they were minors. He had met the teenage girls while filming films during which he regularly set his sights on very young actresses. 

"Making cinema is a kind of cover", he then defended, explaining that "a lot" wanted to spend time with minors, but only directors could, through their films.

Since 2021 and law 418 of the Penal Code, minors are considered sexually adults from the age of 15. Below, it is considered that they can consent to sexual relations with a partner up to 5 years their senior, in other words: only with another minor. Any penetration of a minor under 15 by an adult is rape.