Paris prosecutors launch probe into actress Adèle Haenel's 'paedophilia' accusations against filmmaker

TheThe Paris public prosecution services announced on Wednesday that they have opened a preliminary investigation into French actress Adèle Haenel’s accusations, made in an interview with Mediapart, that filmmaker Christophe Ruggia had sexually harassed her and subjected her to inappropriate “touching” when she was aged between 12 and 15.

The prosecutors’ investigation cites suspected “sexual assault of a minor by a person of authority” and “sexual harassment”.

Ruggia, a prominent film director in France, has firmly denied Haenel’s claims, which were first made in a lengthy investigation published by Mediapart this week, and which she repeated in a live video interview with Mediapart on Monday.

Her accusations concern a period when she was aged between 12 and 15, and which began after she was chosen by Ruggia, as an unknown child actress, to star in his 2002 film Les Diables  (English title, The Devils), when she said his “hold” over her began. Haenel, now 30, a multiple award-winning actress who has since starred in 22 cinema feature films, described the filmmaker’s subsequent behaviour towards her, after the shooting of The Devils ended in September 2001, as including acts of “paedophilia”.

Ruggia, 54, who had declined to be interviewed or to reply to detailed questions submitted in writing before publication of Mediapart’s investigation – when he instead issued a brief statement “categorically” denying wrongdoing and described the questions as “tendentious, inaccurate, fictionalized and sometimes defamatory” – on Wednesday issued a second statement, submitted to Mediapart through his lawyers. In it, he insisted: “I never had towards her, I repeat, physical gestures and a behaviour of sexual harassment which she accuses me of, but I made the mistake of playing Pygmalion, with the misunderstandings and impediments that such an attitude creates. [It was] the hold of a film director towards an actress who he had directed and with whom he dreamed of filming again.”

Haenel spoke out for the first time in public about her accusations against Ruggia in an interview with Mediapart during a seven-month investigation into the allegations, when more than 30 people were interviewed, which was first published in French on November 3rd, and in English on November 5th.

She explained her decision to finally speak of what she called Ruggia’s “constant sexual harassment”, repeated “touching” of her thighs and body and “forced kisses on the neck” over the period between 2002 and 2005 as being because “keeping silent had become unbearable” and because “silence always plays in favour of the guilty”. The actress provided Mediapart with documents supporting her account of her relationship with Ruggia – including letters he sent to her in 2006 and 2007 – and which left her depressed, and what acquaintances described as in a state of distress and anxiety, for several years afterwards.

In his statement sent to Mediapart on Wednesday, Christophe Ruggia wrote: “At the time, I did not see that my adulation and the hopes that I placed in her could have appeared to her, given her young age, as distressing at certain times. If that is the case, and if she can, I ask her to forgive me.”

Following the publication of Mediapart’s investigation, the Association of French Film directors, the SRF, announced this week that it has begun a procedure to expel Ruggia, who was its co-president until June this year, from its membership. That procedure allows Ruggia to defend his position at a hearing if he requests one. Both the SRF and the body that promotes French films, UniFrance, have issued statements in support of Haenel.

The actress has also received the outspoken support, via social media, of many figures in the French cinema industry, including the actresses Marion Cotillard, Julie Gayet, Emmanuelle Béart, Louise Bourgoin, the actor Gilles Lellouche, film director Mati Diop, singers Juliette Armanet and Chris (of Christine and the Queens), and the comedian Manu Payet.

Just hours before the decision by the Paris prosecution services to open an investigation, announced early Wednesday afternoon, French justice minister Nicole Belloubet, speaking in an interview with France Inter radio, advised Haenel to make a formal complaint.

In an interview with Mediapart, the actress had said she did not want to pursue her alleged attacker through the criminal courts, because the legal system “convicts so few attackers”, adding: “The legal system ignores us, we will ignore the legal system.”

Belloubet, who described Haenel’s stand as “very courageous”, told France Inter that the actress was “wrong to think that the justice system cannot respond to this type of situation”, adding, somewhat confusingly, that if she were to lodge a complaint she would “come out stronger, and equally so the situation of the person accused”.

The Paris prosecution services decision to launch an investigation was taken independently of any formal complaint.

“I never thought of [turning to] the justice system because there is a systemic violence towards women by the legal system,” Haenel said in a live video interview with Mediapart broadcast on Monday. “And that’s also what should be talked about. I believe in [a system of] justice, but the justice system must speak for all of society. When one sees to what degree women are disparaged…In situations of sexual violence, it is one rape out of ten which ends up with a conviction [Editor’s note, in France it has been estimated that one alleged case in every 100 leads to a conviction]. What does that say about the nine others? What does it say about all those lives, in fact? The justice system must place itself in question in that regard.”

“There are so many women who are sent off to be crushed, either in the manner in which their complaint is received, or in the way in which their life will be dissected and the way they will be looked at,” Haenel said in the interview. “The 'fault' is themselves; how was she dressed? What did she do? What did she say? What did she drink? Let’s stop. It’s for them that I’m doing this today, because we must all look at ourselves and consider that the justice system, currently, is not representative of society, and that’s a problem.”

In the statement Ruggia gave Mediapart on Wednesday, he said: “I am well conscious of the little weight my words will have. Your journalist carried out an investigation and even if none of those people interviewed spoke of the slightest inappropriate gesture on my part, the closeness of the relationship I had with this adolescent is sufficient to heap reproach on me.”

In fact, Mediapart’s investigation included a number of interviews with people who spoke of their alarm at the director’s relationship with the young Haenel, and notably an account given by the film director and screenwriter Mona Achache. She told Mediapart of a conversation she had with Ruggia when she was his partner, in the spring of 2011, when she said that Ruggia, speaking of the period during the promotional tour of The Devils, “told me that he had had romantic feelings for Adèle”.

Achache, who has no personal links with Haenel, said she questioned Ruggia further, after which he detailed one precise incident. “He was watching a film with Adèle. She was lying down, her head on his knees,” Achache recalled him as saying. “He had passed his hand up from Adèle’s tummy to her chest, under her T-shirt. He told me he saw a look of fear in her, staring wide-eyed, and that he too became frightened and withdrew his hand.”

Ruggia’s statement to Mediapart ended with the conclusion: “My social exclusion is happening and I can do nothing to escape it. The Middle Ages invented the sentence of being put in the stocks, but it was the punishment for a guilty person convicted under law. Now, without any trial, media stocks have been constructed that are just as crucifying and painful and today it is my turn to be subjected to them.”

In her interviews with Mediapart published earlier this week, Adèle Haenel said that if she is speaking out publicly today “it is not to burn Christophe Ruggia” but to “put the world back on the right track”, and “so that torturers stop strutting around and that they look at things in the face”, in order for “shame to change sides”, that “this exploitation of children, women, ceases”, and for there to be “no more possibility of double-talk”.

“I want to tell them that they are right to feel bad, to think that it’s not normal to suffer that, but that they are not alone and that one can survive,” said the actress. “I am not courageous, I am determined,” Haenel added. “To speak out is a way of saying that one survives.”

Meanwhile, the acclaimed Greek-French film director Costa-Gavras, appearing on a live studio debate streamed by Mediapart on Wednesday evening alongside the economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to discuss his film Adults in the Room, began with a spontaneous tribute to Adèle Haenel.

The two men were appearing on Mediapart's regular monthly programme of live debates to discuss the issues raised in the film, which is based on Varoufakis’s book of his experiences during the height of the Greek debt crisis, notably his damning account of the negotiations with the so-called "Troika" that was made up of the the European Commission , the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank . 

Costa-Gavras, 86, president of France’s cinema heritage centre, the Cinémathèque, presenting the film which began screening in French cinemas on Wednesday, asked to speak first about Haenel's stand. “Allow me, before talking about the film, to tell you the emotion I feel this evening to be seated probably in the same chair where Ms Adèle Haenel was probably seated last night,” he said. (In fact, it was on Monday evening that the actress appeared on the Mediapart live debate).

“I saw her interview with great emotion,” he continued. “Because it speaks about our profession. I discovered that there are things in our profession that can be terrible for a young woman, and we do not even realise […] That cannot happen, it must not happen.” He described Haenel as “a wonderful actress” who had “the courage to talk about it”, adding: “I think it opens up a breach, which we must all continue”.

However, questioned by Mediapart’s publishing editor Edwy Plenel, Costa-Gavras maintained his previous defence of fellow director Roman Polanski, who is also based in France and who is wanted in the US on charges of raping a 13-year-old girl, arguing that the latter should be given pardon.

The extract of Costa-Gavras's comments about Adèle Haenel can be seen in the video below (click screen to play, in French):

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The French version of this report can be found here.

English version by Graham Tearse