2024-02-14 16:58:59
Sexual violence fileIn an investigation by “Obs”, the actress reveals the controlling relationship she had with the director in the 90s when she was only 16 and he was 52.
Their voices intermingle and carry each other, striking the heavy silence in which they have been locked up. Inspired by the testimony of the actress Judith Godrèche against the filmmakers Benoît Jacquot but also Jacques Doillon, against whom a complaint was filed for rape, Sarah Grappin decided to recover this word that had been stolen from her for decades. It’s in the pages of Obs that the actress revealed, this Tuesday, her relationship under influence with the director Alain Corneau when she was, just like Judith Godrèche, still a teenager. If the testimony of her colleague produced the final trigger, the reading of Vanessa Springora’s Consent will also have prepared Sarah Grappin for this possibility of publicly accusing the director, who died in 2010, of rape and sexual assault.
She met the filmmaker in 1994, on the set of the film Le Nouveau Monde. She is 15, he is 52. At the end of filming, Alain Corneau, who won the César for best film with Tous les matins du monde two years earlier, allegedly pulled her into a corner and asked: “Is that you want to kiss me ?” A “rhetorical” question as he dominates the moment with his age and his status,” notes the weekly in its investigation. A relationship begins under influence, with the magazine she remembers an “ambivalence”, that of an adolescent amazed at “being the chosen one of the most cultured man in the world” as much as disgusted by his physical contact that she does not want. “I just want his gaze on me,” confides the woman who was also a victim of incest, noting that she “feels like an adult” in those moments.
“You’re not the only one going through this.”
The filmmaker even says to Sarah Grappin: “You are not the only one to experience this, it happened to Judith Godrèche.” He meets her in cafes, kisses her in the street, takes her to restaurants, puts her in his car and even invites her to come to his house, sometimes in the presence of his partner Nadine Trintignant. Alain Corneau allegedly imposed non-consensual digital penetration on him three times, i.e. acts criminally classified as rape. This controlling relationship lasts a year and a half. “For a very long time, I went beyond embellishing, I told myself a great love story to survive. The work of recent years has been to come out of denial,” recalls the actress. Years needed to also be able to qualify the violence suffered: “About Corneau, I have only been talking about digital rape since I read Vanessa Springora.”
The first revelation came for Sarah Grappin in 2003 at the time of the death of Alain Corneau’s daughter-in-law Marie Trintignant, killed by singer Bertrand Cantat. “I watch an interview with Alain who talks about her, her role in Série noire and… I have a revelation. His look and the lexical field he uses are identical to those of our tête-à-têtes at the Wepler.” In the wake of the #MeToo movement, in 2018, she testified anonymously on a platform dedicated to sexual violence in cinema and screenwriter Geoffroy Grison, collecting the testimonies, recognized her and called her. “It was heartbreaking to see how far she had come, how long it had taken to discover the abusive nature of the relationship. I saw the damage, the energy spent… Especially since, for him, it must not have been much,” he notes to Obs.
“This is all ridiculous.”
While several friends of the actress were able to perceive signals of this discomfort and this violence, the widow of Alain Corneau, Nadine Trintignant, who had initially signed the column in support of Gérard Depardieu before recognizing “a serious error”, dismisses these accusations to the Obs: “I hear this nonsense from all sides, not at all about Alain, but about lots of people and I don’t want to participate in all that . This is all ridiculous. It’s not against you, but it’s against the way people say nonsense. I don’t want people to say anything, especially about my husband, who is dead and can no longer defend himself.” The death of the filmmaker was also devastating for Sarah Grappin. After a silence, she told the weekly: “I understood that day that I would have no real reparation, that he would never come to apologize, that I would never be able to talk to him about it.” All that remains for her is to take part, through her testimony, in this revival of #MeToo in French cinema to “denounce impunity and its damage”.
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