why she “does not wish” to reveal the identity of her attacker

2023-09-24 21:00:08

Emmanuelle Béart opens up about the incest she suffered in her childhood and adolescence in the documentary “Un silence si bois” this Sunday on M6.

It’s been 19 years sinceEmmanuelle Béart wants to talk about incest, without finding the form. It is now done. This Sunday, September 24 at 11:10 p.m., M6 broadcasts “Un silence si bois”, directed by the French actress and Anastasia Mikova, in which the actress publicly reveals having been a victim of incest from the ages of 11 to 14. In this film, the two directors collect the words of four other victims of incest, in order to highlight the trauma and mechanisms linked to this type of aggression.

Emmanuelle Béart also made it known that she “does not wish” to reveal the identity of her attacker, because it is not “the approach” of the film, explained the co-director during a presentation of the documentary at the press before its television broadcast, the actress not having been able to be present for the occasion herself. She confirms, however, that her attacker is not her father, the singer Guy Béart, who died on September 16, 2015.

To Ouest-France, she explains that “The idea is not to bring light to me but to the subject. Incest is a collective trauma. It is our duty as citizens to participate in this debate to fight together against the guardians of the temple and against a kind of crazy societal denial”.

“The extreme violence of an act committed without violence”

Emmanuelle Béart says she was aware of having been the victim of abuse in her early adolescence. “It’s not because I kept silent that I didn’t understand that what happened to me at night was forbidden,” she explains in an interview with Libération before the release of the documentary. “As far as I’m concerned, what was the most violent was the extreme violence of an act committed without violence. That this man didn’t even need to say ‘shut up’ to me so that I shut up.”

Now aged 60, it took many years for the actress to speak publicly about her trauma. “The main reason [de ce silence] is that no one talked to us about that. At the time, what happened to me had no existence in society, in my family, at school. And I was terrified. When we are frozen and terrified and totally isolated by the person who attacks us, we do not speak.” Emmanuelle Béart will explain that “if [son] father, [sa] mother, [son] école, [ses] friends don’t see anything”, it was ultimately his grandmother who “saved his skin”.