French film director Nicolas Bedos faces investigation over rape and sexual assault claims

OnOn July 5th prosecutors in Paris opened a preliminary investigation into “rape” and “sexual assault” claims concerning the French film director Nicolas Bedos. This was first revealed by Mediapart on July 18th and later confirmed to the AFP news agency by the prosecution service. The investigation, which will be carried out by detectives from the 1st District de Police Judiciaire (DPJ) in Paris, covers three separate sets of allegations. One concerns “rape and sexual assault” and the other two both “sexual assault”. The probe was triggered after prosecutors were alerted by statements made by women at the end of June. One of these women was interviewed on July 4th, and a second was due to be spoken to on July 21st.

When contacted via his lawyer Julia Minkowski on July 12th, Nicolas Bedos, aged 44, who is perhaps best known for directing the 2019 romantic comedy drama La Belle Époque, and who benefits from a presumption of innocence, declined to make any comment (see his lawyer's full response at the end of this article).

In addition to these new proceedings, Nicolas Bedos is due to stand trial in February 2024 for “sexual assault while in a state of drunkenness” after a complaint was filed against him on June 12th. A 25-year-old woman accuses the filmmaker of having touched her intimately over her jeans in a Paris nightclub on the night of June 1st, according to what she told detectives, and as reported by the website Actu17 and the news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The complainant said that she did not know who Nicolas Bedos was when he came towards her, that she had “pushed him off” when, “without saying a word”, he had “stretched out his hand at the level of my knickers”, and that she had then told him: “Go and get treatment!” A security guard is then said to have escorted Nicolas Bedos off the premises. In this case, too, the filmmaker benefits from a presumption of innocence.

The director's lawyer told Mediapart that in relation to this nightclub episode “Mr Bedos explained himself at length to the police and is reserving his comments for the courts. As I've already said, he has not questioned the complainant's statement, to whom he has directly apologised.” On June 22nd Julia Minkowski told the AFP news agency that her client had “no memory” of such actions, which “could only have been accidental while in an inebriated state”.

That word “accidental” drew a response from four women who decided to tell their stories to Mediapart. Among them are two of the women who alerted the authorities at the end of June.

'Suddenly his expression had changed'

'Chloé' – not her real name – told Mediapart that she “went to give a statement to say that it was certainly not an accident”. On June 27th she sent a letter to the public prosecutor's office in Paris. “This news [editor's note, of Nicolas Bedos being held in custody over the June 2023 nightclub case] gives me the strength to write to you. At the end of the 1990s he sexually and physically assaulted me in the context of a work and friendship [relationship],” she said in her statement, which has been seen by Mediapart.  “...Each year I've hoped that a braver woman than me would make a complaint, it seems that has happened.”

This 50-year-old actor and scriptwriter had already sent her story to Mediapart back in November 2019 after French actress Adèle Hamel spoke to us. Her story goes back to 1999. At the time she was 26 and working as a waitress while developing her artistic career. Nicolas Bedos was aged just 20 but had already worked for two years as an advisor in the 'Canal Plus Idéé' unit at Canal Plus where he was in charge of unearthing new writers and actors for the television channel.

Chloe says that she met Bedos with 'Isabelle' – not her real name - an actor friend with whom she worked. The latter recalls that during this meeting Nicolas Bedos had “set his sights on” Chloé. He gave her some tests and a “form of friendly relationship” began, despite a character which she felt to be “odious” and his “sometimes violent attitudes”, says Chloé, who thought at the time that he could “help her with work”. But on a professional level “nothing concrete” came from it.

One evening she agreed to go with him to a gathering at the home of friends of his, and then on to his parents' home in Neuilly in the western suburbs of Paris where he then lived. At the time she says she saw “no problem” with this as he had told her that “his parents and sister were sleeping” in the apartment.

But once they arrived at his home things “went off the rails”, she says. According to her version of events, he had insisted that she went “into his room”. She says that she then began “gathering my things saying that I was going to leave” but that he “grabbed me by the throat, held me against the wall” and that he then said something which has always stayed with her: “Who do you take yourself for, you're not Catherine Deneuve!”

She had been “really scared”, she says. “His expression had suddenly changed, there was contempt in his voice, almost disgust, I was in a state of terror, unable to utter a word,” she insists. She only recalls three things about what happened next. The first is that she allowed herself to “go to his bedroom” because she had been “really ashamed” - it was gone midnight, she was in his home and she thought that “it was my fault”. Then she has a “physical memory”: she says that she “felt pain when he penetrated me”. Finally, she recalls being in a taxi in the middle of the night with a driver who had agreed to take her for free as he had seen she was in a distressed state. “I cried the whole journey without saying a word,” she recalls.

She told no one anything about what had happened. Or rather, she told “the first half of the story, the bit which was honourable for me,” she says. Two days later she told her friend Isabelle that she had struggled and managed to get away. She said this because she felt “so ashamed” she says. But also because “twenty years before #MeToo and ten years before King Kong Theory [editor's note, a book by filmmaker and novelist Virginie Despentes, in which she recounts how she was raped]” she was convinced that the full version of her story would not be listened to. “They'd have said that I hadn't been raped, that I had agreed to go to his place,” she says.

Isabelle well remembers what Chloé told her at the time – she has recounted this to Mediapart – but above all she recalls her friend's “fear” and “anger”. Isabelle says: “She said that he was sick. Given the state that she was in, I thought that she had left out part of the story.”

In the following years, Chloé did not tell successive partners about it either. All they knew was that she had had a “bad experience” with Nicolas Bedos. In 2011, during a wedding at which the director was present, she had simply said to her partner quietly: “I don't feel comfortable with this guy, stay with me.”

Chloé says that she had “taken time to find the right words for this event”. She continues: “I didn't want that to have happened to me. For me rape was Guy Georges [editor's note, a serial rapist], it didn't happen with people you know.”

Questioned by Mediapart about this account, Nicolas Bedos declined to comment.

It took several developments before she overcame her “shame” and her “guilt”, Chloé says. In 2009 she told 'Marion', a close friend of Nicolas Bedos, in a roundabout way of a “painful experience” she had had with the filmmaker. Marion – not her real name – then replied: “That doesn't surprise me.” Chloe says now: “That came as a relief, I told myself that it wasn't my fault.”

Then in 2017 the impact of #MeToo gave her further insight into her own experience. “I started to read lots of stories but each case that came out hurt me again, I told myself 'here are some brave people'.”

Then something occurred that made her angry: the publication of an article by Nicolas Bedos on the HuffPost website. While criticising the “anti-freedom abuses” of the #MeToo movement which he said fuelled “a war of the sexes” the filmmaker wrote: “Neither money nor power permits you to abuse anyone's body on this earth. A free world is a world where women would know that the men would know that if they try to abuse them they'll be punished. A free world is one in which women should be able to refuse any smutty proposition whatsoever without their professional career being affected by it.” Chloé recalls: “That wound me up. I started to become angry.” This feeling of anger grew even stronger when, in that same year, she was told that the filmmaker had allegedly attacked their mutual friend Marion. The latter told Chloé about this several days after the event, at the end of August 2017.

'I was afraid of someone I used to look on as a friend'

Unlike Chloé, Marion had first met Nicolas Bedos in a personal capacity when she was a teenager. In August 2017, when she was invited to stay at the house the director and his partner at the time had rented for the summer, he displayed “inappropriate and violent behaviour towards me”, Marion wrote in her letter to the Paris prosecution service on June 28th this year.

She says that “at the end of the evening” Nicolas Bedos had “tried forcibly to kiss me” in a room in which she was “alone with him”. She said that she had “first of all pushed him off nicely” because they had been “friends for a long time”. But his expression then “changed” and he “became aggressive” and “stopped me from leaving” the room by “holding me firmly by the shoulders as he continued to try to kiss me”, she says in her letter. She insists that it was only by pushing him off “violently” that she was “able to get out”. She concludes in her letter: “That day I was afraid of someone I used to look on as a friend.”

Marion told Mediapart said that at the time she had said nothing to others present in the house, knowing that it would “cause a scene”. When she got back to Paris she told her partner, then female friends – three of whom have confirmed this to Mediapart. When approached by Mediapart, Marion's partner recalls that she was both “furious” and “shocked that he had attacked her” and he says that he had himself confronted Nicolas Bedos, who had insisted that he had no recollection of it.

Marion also explained that having got back from Paris she, too, had confronted the director “by text” and ended their friendship. “His excuse was alcohol, he remembered nothing … For me that was more of a modus operandi than an 'excuse',” she says in her letter to the prosecution service. She did not keep these “long SMS conversations” but two of her friends who read them at the time have confirmed their existence and content to Mediapart.

She says she decided to confront him with the facts by text that day because she says that during an earlier evening in Paris she had seen “violent and humiliating behaviour” by him towards a young woman in his company - whose identity she does not know. Marion says she told the director by text message that “for too long” she had “seen him act like that with women and that I could no longer keep quiet, that what had happened that summer with me had been the final straw”.

On June 22nd this year, when the press reported that Nicolas Bedos had been in custody the day before for “sexual assault”, Chloé and Marion immediately phoned each other. As far as they were concerned their next step was obvious: they had to make a statement to support the complainant's story. A few days later they each sent a letter to the prosecution authorities.

In her letter to the prosecution service, Marion said that the episode had “not traumatised” her but that she felt she had to “speak out today because I know that other women are victims of his violence and his objectification of women, of his belief that you can do anything with them”. She says in her letter: “I have said nothing for too long.” She told Mediapart: “Nothing justifies keeping quiet, in a certain way we were accomplices, or in any case cowardly.”

Questioned by Mediapart about this account, Nicolas Bedos declined to comment.

Statements similar to that of the complainant

Mediapart has gathered other accounts which have not been the subject of any formal complaint or alert, but which show similarities with the statement made by the 25-year-old complainant on June 12th. Leslie Masson, a former model, recalls the “scandalous behaviour” that she says Nicolas Bedos showed towards her in 2010 when she was 23. She says that the director, whom she didn't know, had first of all come and “hit on” her “six or seven times” in an “insistent” way while “drunk” at a bar called Le Mauri7, then at Le Baron, a well-known Paris nightclub that is now closed. This was despite the fact that he had “rejected” him saying she “wasn't interested”.

At Le Baron she says he “tried to touch me between my legs”; she then “pushed him off” and he said to her several times: “Go on, be a good girl, come and suck me in the loo.” Leslie Masson says: “I refused and he spat in my face.” She said that even as the filmmaker was seeking sexual favours he was making more and more “unpleasant” and “denigrating” comments.

The former model says that the nightclub bouncer – whom Mediapart has not been able to contact as the club is now closed – told her that the filmmaker was a “regular”, that he could get “heavy” and that “if he bothered me too much” I should “come and see him”. She says that the bouncer told Nicolas Bedos to “calm down” before “chucking him out of the club” after the incident.

On June 23rd, having learnt that the director had been in police custody, Leslie Masson recounted these alleged events in a short entry on her Instagram account. While she had “not been traumatised at all”, she told Mediapart she wants to tell her story “so that this kind of attitude is no longer just accepted”, and to make clear that “just because you're drunk, it doesn't mean you have the right to behave like that”.

'Julie' – not her real name – was also 23 when she came across Nicolas Bedos in another well-known Paris nightclub, Montanna, located in the well-heeled area of Saint-Germain-de-Près. She was also “shaken” when the filmmaker's lawyer spoke of her client's “accidental” behaviour. For she said that she had herself noticed a “problematic” behaviour towards women in the club that she used to visit regularly between 2011 and 2014.

She says that Nicolas Bedos had approached her several times. On one evening he had been “more insistent”, she says. “He sat next to me, he was completely drunk, he started to speak to me and quickly got annoyed because I was very terse and uninterested,” she says. “He said to me 'Do you know who I am? My father is Guy Bedos' [editor's note, an actor and screenwriter who died in 2020]. That stayed with me because it was really ridiculous.”

Julie says that she “cut him short” and went off to the dance floor but that he had followed her and, she says, “kneeled on the floor in front of me”, then “lifted my leg while holding my foot” and had “licked my foot” - she was wearing open-toed high-heels. “It shocked and disgusted me at the time. I pushed him off and I left,” she recalls.

That did not stop Nicolas Bedos from approaching her again on another evening, she says. As she was leaving the club with friends at around 6am she says he “gatecrashed” the group and said: “Come on, let's get an hotel room and have fun.” She said she simply “ignored” him. Her best friend Claire confirmed that this is what Julie told her during one of their “debriefs” the following evening.

Julie says that the events she describes are “not as serious as sexual assault” but that they say “a lot about the person, who seems to have a problem with women, and for a long time”.

Questioned by Mediapart about this account, Nicolas Bedos declined to comment.

When they found out in the press about the “sexual assault” complaint against the director, these four women were not “astonished”, they told Mediapart. On the contrary, they were “surprised” that he had “escaped through the net up till now”, Marion says. “I'd always thought that there would be things about him, when I saw the article I said to myself 'finally!'” says Julie.

Another word that crops up among these women and the witnesses interviewed is “impunity”. All of them think that the award-winning director, who comes from a “privileged background” - he was born in the well-heeled Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, is the son of the well-known actor Guy Bedos and has mixed with showbiz figures since childhood – has taken advantage of his powerful position. “I find it hard to take that he's continuing to use his methods with all the impunity of a famous person,” said Chloé in her letter to the prosecution authorities.

Meanwhile the director himself has often blamed his excesses on his “problems with alcohol”. In numerous interviews he has said this had led him to go “over the top at night” at Le Baron, to do “things that were not me, like a pig, an animal”. He told Vogue magazine in 2019 of how he had “insulted a guy who I thought was very nice”; had said “'fat slag' to a female friend” and had displayed “crude behaviour at 3am”.

This is also the line of defence he adopted when faced with the complaint over “sexual assault” made in June – and from which he benefits from a presumption of innocence. In any case, in criminal cases being drunk is not a mitigating circumstance but an aggravating one.

Accusations of sexism and misogyny

In the course of Mediapart's investigation several people have said that Nicolas Bedos has a reputation in the cinema world of showing “problematic behaviour” towards women.

The director is also known for his aggressive reaction when he does not like what someone has said. Several web users have published virulent or insulting private messages received from one of his social media accounts after they have given their views on him or his films. Mediapart is also aware of outspoken messages sent to journalists whose articles have displeased him.

In 2011 he threatened a journalist from the publication Technikart by SMS message after it devoted its front page to him. “I decided a long time ago to slap your sour little face, it will make you think before writing crap,” he wrote. When asked about this message by the magazine, he accepted that he was “potentially the guy who writes texts like that” but had added: “I don't understand why some have the right to write false, unfair, disgusting things to satisfy their bile and why one has to keep one's mouth shut and take the hit.”

In articles, interviews and videos involving the filmmaker there is no shortage of examples of virulent language towards women. In 2011, in the literary programme 'Au Field de la Nuit' on TFI television channel, Nicolas Bedos had a go at Mathilde Warnier, a student who criticised his book. “You're not going to piss me off with your crappy questions, you can take your microphone, you can shove it up your arse and bugger off. [This is your way] of sticking your oar in, because you want to do television, like all bitches,” he told her (see video below).

That same year, in an acerbic article published by Marianne magazine, he complained about the “eight years that it took” for the writer Tristane Banon to “make a complaint against” Dominique Strauss-Kahn – the French politician and former managing director of the IMF - for “attempted rape”. He described her as a “late crier” and a “recovering novelist less good than Torreton [editor's note, the French actor Philippe Torreton] in the role of victim”. Then on RMC radio, again mocking her delayed complaint, he said: “At some point, if she undressed as slowly as this, it's an incitement to rape.”

A reference to his behaviour was made in 2017 in a song by a comedian on France Inter public radio, which was dedicated to her partner who had left her. “It could have been a lot worse/Yes, it's true that I could have got Nicolas Bedos or [editor's note, she used the name of a well-known singer here],” sang the comedian.

A megaphone for #MeToo critics

In recent years the director has also become a megaphone for those who strongly criticise #MeToo. While insisting that the “benefits of speaking out freely are undeniable”, the filmmaker sees this movement as a “nauseating system”, a “medieval feeding frenzy” and likens it to a “pack” that demands its daily “share of accusations” after which “the media improvise a summary trial and, immediately, one is pilloried”.

According to the director, the #MeToo hashtag has given rise to “anti-freedom abuses, a form of denunciation, lynchings, a total lack of nuance among some people, a confusion between hitting on someone and aggression, between passion and harassment” and a “backwards step in other combats such as the presumption of innocence, the right to be forgotten”.

Nicolas Bedos criticises what he sees as a global societal shift which comes from the “ancient world”. He told Technikart in 2019: “We live in a bizarre era. You can no longer drive fast, look at this or that, we have restaurants which are almost cults where you have to eat radishes.”

On France Inter radio he expressed again his nostalgia for an “era that was much more transgressive”, and declared: “Because the world we now live in, where a filmmaker-producer apologises for his infidelities on a news channel, that's not particularly cool.” He was making a reference to the director Luc Besson who had just been on BFMTV news station to defend himself against accusations of “sexual violence” and who had admitted to extramarital relations (the case against him was subsequently dropped).

Some saw it as an anti-#MeToo gesture when in June 2019 Nicolas Bedos arrived at a film preview with veteran director Roman Polanski, who has been accused by six teenagers of rape or sexual assault over the years, and who was convicted in 1977 for sexual relations with a girl of 13.

When he was asked for his views at a 2020 awards ceremony that gave Roman Polanski the prize for best director, Nicolas Bedos said it was “for women to say”. He said: “I'm keeping quiet as a dominant white male, as one somewhat questionably says. It would be unwelcome and doubtless illegitimate now. Later, I think there'll be a lot to say on all that ….” (see this video for his full comments).

Some years earlier, in 2011, Nicolas Bedos had spoken of his “fear” about the direction taken by the cases involving singer Bertrand Cantat (convicted of the murder of his partner Marie Trintignant) and Dominique Strauss-Kahn (accused of “rape” and “attempted rape” by two women but who did not face proceedings as the alleged events had occurred too long before). In his view these represented “almost a trial” of “passion, of excess, mad love” and “infidelity”. He said: “That [Dominique Strauss-Kahn] may have gone into hotel rooms, that he did whatever it might be, that's none of our business, it's no concern of ours!”. See the full extract here:

These interventions in the media, on social media and also in some of his films (for example here and here) have regularly led to him being accused of sexism and misogyny. “Wrongly,” according to him. “It winds me up that certain women see me as misogynist, while hoping that others will have understood just how wrong that is,” he told Elle magazine in 2013.

During interviews in recent years the director has acknowledged “some excesses” and behaviour that has sometimes been “unpleasant” (on the 'Thé ou café' programme in 2017), some “tendencies to dominate” and some “domineering instincts” (in Madame Figaro magazine in 2020) and also a post-#MeToo introspection: “This #MeToo affair was a time for me, as it was for male friends, to question some of our own comments, about our point of view.”

This last comment was in Vogue in 2019. He told the American magazine that he “felt that, with my image of seducer, of a pseudo-fop, I was in the sights of certain women”. At the same time he criticised again what he saw as confused thinking. “Don Juan-ism and sexual assault are different things. You even have the right to be a stupid bastard, as you also have the right to be a stupid bitch.” In any case, it is against a complaint of “sexual assault” that Nicolas Bedos will have to defend himself in a criminal court in Paris in February 2024.

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• The original French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter