“At 14, we’re not excited about sleeping with a 40-year-old.” Judith Godrech protests against Benoit Jaco’s comments.

“Consent doesn’t exist in 14,” protested Judith Godrech on the set of Quotidien this Monday, January 8. Her voice trembling in front of Jan Barthes, she wanted to go back to Benoit Jacque’s comments about their relationship in a 2011 documentary, The tricks of desire, by Gerard Miller. A quote that a netizen sent her last weekend after her Instagram story went viral, in which she stated: “His name is Benoit Jaco. He still manipulates those who can associate their names with me. Witness! He is threatening to take me to court for defamation,” we can read. Indeed, since last week, the 51-year-old actress has publicly accused and condemned the controlling relationship she had with the director when she was a teenager and he was 40.

In the published sequence, the film director is questioned about his love affair with the actress. A story that lasted almost six years. “It is definitely a violation of the law, even if only in terms of the law, as he says. In principle, we have no right. A girl like her, like this Judith, was actually 15 years old and I was 40, I had no right. But he wasn’t giving it away, and even he was very excited about it. Filmmaking is a kind of cover, in the sense of this kind of covering of manners.’

Words that Judith Godrech had never discovered until now. “It made me sick. Seeing him turn me into an object, talking about me like something, speaking for me. Talking about my desire was so cruel,” she said very excited.

“The Pleasure of the Clock”

While watching the clip, she claims she “began to shake compulsively” while her children waited for her dinner. “I could not leave my room. I threw. I was in a panic, he continues. I was this way of acting as a child… This child who had no way of understanding the concept of consent. There was no agreement. In 14, agreement does not exist. At 14, you weren’t excited to sleep with a 40-year-old boy. It doesn’t exist.” And continue. “He reverses the roles, projects his excitement onto me. He sexualizes me. I felt this sexualization, I was there. But in 2011, to hear him talk like that, to still be able to use those words, in a very secular way, laughing, bragging about them. Impunity is at such a level. It’s a monster’s pleasure.” The actress also adds that in the footage of the said documentary, she is 17 years old, not 14, the age when she met the director on the set of the film. Beggars “It would have been more shocking (…) I really looked like a child.”

Judith Godrech was also questioned about life as a couple, as well as the circumstances surrounding her separation from her husband, who is now 76 years old. The actress, who lived with the film director for 6 years, returned to the influence he had on her. “He took the place of his father, mother and employer. He was my world, like a guru,” she declared, clarifying that it opened her eyes to the toxicity of her situation in the eyes of a “benevolent” man of her partner’s age who was suspicious of this “strange” union. . Because Judith Godrech denounced the silence of the 7th art in the 1980s. Therefore, everyone knew, but no one said anything.

According to him, the documentary confirms this. “It’s on TV. And it’s a show that’s been watched a lot, I think. (…) He also said that “people looked at me quite jealously, and it’s not unpleasant”… How can you say that? How is it possible that no journalist called the police in 2011? There is a guy who says on TV that when he was 40 years old, he was with a 14-year-old girl, he says with a smile, and no one calls the deputy prime minister. It makes me angry,” she confided. When asked what he would say to Benoit Jaco, if he were to face him today, he answered: “I wouldn’t wish that on myself. His face gives me a nightmare effect. There is something physically impossible for me. And repeat. “I don’t wish that on myself, no.”