According to Mediapart's information the preliminary investigation started in May 2018 to examine rape allegations against French film director Luc Besson has now been completed and a file handed to the prosecutors' office in Paris. Prosecutors must now decide what happens next: they could take no further action and drop the case, order additional enquiries or order a full judge-led investigation.
Besson, 59, the celebrated producer and director behind blockbuster films that include 'Nikita', ‘The Big Blue’, 'Leon', ‘The Fifth Element’ and 'Lucy', and who strongly denies the claims, was questioned by detectives in October 2018 and took part in a face-to-face encounter with the complainant, Belgian-Dutch actress Sand Van Roy, with the police on December 11th. Among the information and evidence that have been examined by detectives have been photographs and a report from medical forensic experts confirming the presence of marks on the complainant's body.
The 31-year-old actress accuses the filmmaker of having raped her on several occasions. She described to detectives two years of being under what she has called a “hold”, of fear, of clashes and sudden changes, leading to the night of the 17th to 18th of May, 2018, at Le Bristol Hotel in Paris (read her story here).
The day after this night in the Paris hotel the actress made a formal complaint of rape against the French director and producer. This was followed by a second complaint made on July 6th alleging other rapes. The actress was interviewed twice by detectives.
During that night in May at the Bristol Hotel Sand Van Roy says she passed out twice, during and after sexual relations. Contrary to what many media outlets initially stated, she has never told the police that she was drugged (see Mediapart's article here). Toxicology reports apparently show no traces of drugs.
However, the actress told detectives that after sex she fell in the hotel room's bathroom having felt an impact “in the back”; she says she does not know what caused this impact.
When she went to the police station in Paris on May 18th several marks on her body – in particular a bruise to her left eye and three symmetric marks on her back - were noted immediately afterwards by the medical forensic unit at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Paris.
A series of photographs taken by Sand Van Roy and those close to her in the days following that night at the Bristol, and sent to the police on May 19th, also confirm the presence of these marks. Today, seven months after the events of that night, the young woman still bears the scars of the three marks on her back, according to another photograph seen by Mediapart.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Enlargement : Illustration 2
How can these marks be explained? Are they the consequences of that night spent at the Bristol with Luc Besson? The actress herself has told Mediapart she ascribes them to her fall in the hotel room bathroom – the “blow in the back” that she felt and the “impact of the floor”. She says that after that evening she also felt “pain” in several places on her body.
Two people close to her – her mother, Henriette Van der Pas, a doctor in Belgium, and her best friend, the actor and scriptwriter Wilfried Capet – have told Mediapart that they saw these injuries the day after the night at the Bristol. “I noticed a bruise to her left eye on May 18th, around 10.45am, during our video conversation on Facetime. My daughter was in a state of shock, she hadn't noticed it,” recalls Henriette Van der Pas.
“When I met Sand, on the evening of May 18th in Paris, she had a black eye and several kinds of bruises on her back, along her spinal column. Indeed, I took several photos,” recalls Wilfried Capet. “However, the day before [editor's note, May 17th] at Cannes, where we were together for the [film] festival, before she left for Paris, she had nothing at all. There were five of us in a small studio flat, we'd have noticed if she had such marks,” he insists.
As for Luc Besson, he insists that he had not noticed anything that evening. That was what he told detectives during the face to face with the actress when they asked him if he had noticed anything on Sand Van Roy's face at the Bristol. The filmmaker explained that the lights were subdued and that he was tired.
When detectives pointed to the report by the medical forensic experts and the presence, in particular, of the bruise to her eye, the director continued to maintain that he had seen nothing. “He said he noticed nothing on her face,” his lawyer Thierry Marembert confirmed to news agency AFP. Luc Besson also denied that the complainant passed out several times that evening. More generally he rejected all the accusations made by Sand Van Roy and explained that he had had a relationship with her for two years.
The justice system will now have to unravel these two flatly contradictory versions of events and decide on the origin of those injuries.
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Apart from the photographs, Sand Van Roy has sent detectives a series of documents - written messages and vocal exchanges with those close to her and with Luc Besson, bills, train tickets and so on – in support of her story. Among them is a report from her psychiatrist, which has been seen by Mediapart. The actress told Mediapart that she spoke to this doctor - whom she has been consulting since March 19th 2018 - about the “humiliations” she says she suffered at the hands of the film-maker, and did so several weeks before she made her first formal complaint.
In his report, dated December 14th 2018, the psychiatrist confirms that the young woman had been under his supervision for “several months” and states that she had described to him being “under the influence of a known cinema director who subjected her to violence and humiliations”. He attested to the actress's “state of great anxiety” at the time.
Those close to the actress say that they saw her “change” during the months leading up to the complaint in May, and say they witnessed her fall under the “control” of the famous director and producer, as Mediapart has previously described. Her mother spoke of a spiral of “manipulation” and “lies”. Her best friend, Wilfried Capet - to whom the actress described in March 2017 what he calls the “sexual abuse” that she has now reported to the police – told Mediapart how she “felt under an influence”. The actress caused bewilderment among those close to her. On the one hand they saw her submissive, calling Luc Besson “my heart, my love”, and sometimes sending hearts to him by text. On the other they also heard her say that she could not take it any more, that she was suffering and they saw her in a state of “anguish”.
On May 17th 2018, just a few hours before going to the Bristol hotel in Paris, she left Wilfried Cape the following voice message, which Mediapart has listened to. “If I don’t go, he’s gonna be so mad, and I’m gonna have to pay for it, and I’m gonna regret it … He has conditioned me to behave in a certain way.” On the WhatsAp message system she wrote in English: “I don’t know how I’m gonna have sex with him if I don’t drink myself to the point where I no longer feel pain,” A few hours earlier, however, she had messaged Besson with a heart symbol.
“He called every day, sent hearts by SMS, while inflicting violence and humiliation. I was living in a state of confusion. I said to him what he wanted to hear, out of fear of reprisals,” the actress explained. Sand Van Roy thinks that she became the producer's “puppet”. She said: “He transformed me into what he wanted me to be. He made me a blonde, made me speak in this voice [editor's note, a child's voice], put on dresses, lose weight.” During the course of just over two years she says the director made her have unprotected sex several times, and also take part in practices which “disgusted” her, she told Mediapart.
However, speaking on RMC radio on May 20th following Van Roy’s rape complaint, Besson's lawyer Thierry Marembert described the actress's “accusations” as “crazy” and said his client had “fallen off his chair when he learned about them”. The director “categorically denies any inappropriate and reprehensible behaviour of any kind”, said the lawyer. Mr Marembert said his client knew this young woman “like he knows just about everyone in the world of cinema” and that “he has never raped her or anyone else”.
Since then Luc Besson and his lawyer have remained silent. Though they have been approached for a comment many times by Mediapart since July last year, they have not responded. “The subjects you mention are the object of an ongoing investigation,” Mr Marembert told Mediapart last July. “You will therefore understand that Mr Besson is keeping his answers for the investigators to whom he has made himself available in order for his innocence to be proven.”
Meanwhile Sand Van Roy's lawyer, Carine Durrieu-Diebolt, criticised the “completely incoherent version” of events given by Luc Besson. She told Mediapart that the film-maker had been “put in a difficult position” by detectives during the face to face meeting with the actress by the issue of her client's “bruise in the corner of the eye” which was, she said, “perfectly visible”. Carine Durrieu-Diebolt also said that while Besson had told the police that he had had a “perfectly harmonious relationship” with Sand Van Roy, he has “not been able to explain the complainant's exchanges with some of those close to her, several weeks before the complaint, which clearly mention instances of rape. These pieces of information are only logical if the reported facts are acknowledged,” says the lawyer.
Since July 2018 Mediapart has published the accounts of nine women accusing Luc Besson of sexually inappropriate behaviour (see the two accounts here and here). Four of them have told their stories to detectives as part of the current investigation.
In addition to Sand Van Roy, Amandine - not her real name – a former casting director who worked with Luc Besson between 2002 and 2005, wrote in July 2018 to the state prosecutor in Paris to report acts that she described as “sexual assaults”. She was interviewed by police on September 13th.
In July last year Laura, not her real name, a former student at the Cité du Cinema film school, reported to police that she considered she had been the victim of “sexual harassment” which she says she was subjected to in 2016 during the shooting of the film 'Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets'. Finally, on December 18th 2018 the former model Karine Isambert told the investigators of events dating back to 1995 (see her account in Mediapart's broadcast here).
While these nine women report acts of different seriousness, their accounts corroborate each other on several points. The majority describe what are, at the very least, inappropriate, similar and repeated behaviour by Luc Besson towards young women working or likely to work with him. A number of them say they feared the professional consequences – the fear of losing their job, of being “blacklisted” of being “cut out of [films] during editing” for example – if they reported the director's attitude.
At the heart of this case is the position of considerable power that Luc Besson occupies in a sector that is competitive and precarious for many actors and actresses. The results of the initial police investigation into the claims against Luc Besson, who benefits from the presumption of innocence, are now being examined by prosecutors.
Meanwhile the accusations against the filmmaker have had a economic impact on his production company EuropaCorp, which already faced financial difficulties (read Mediapart's article in French here). According to its latest financial report, published in December 2018, the business posted loses of 101 million dollars in its half-year results. The company is having to close its distribution department and has no more films in production.
According to Mediapart's information, the release of the next film, 'Anna', in the United States by distributor Lionsgate is still on hold. In France the film was supposed to have come out on January 2nd, was then pushed back to March 27th and according to specialist industry publication Satellifax, it currently has no release date.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter