Julia Roy was sitting at the back of the auditorium at Sciences Po in Paris. On January 29, 2013, the 23-year-old student had come to listen to a lecture by a director she didn't know, Benoît Jacquot, who had been invited to talk about the "politics of intimacy." "He stared at me throughout the session, and I was a little surprised," she told Le Monde 11 years later. At the end, she went to greet the speaker. "Benoît Jacquot jumped on me to hand me a piece of paper with his number and asked me several times to call him."
Since her Austrian childhood in Vienna, Roy, who at the time had only played a small role in a TV series, has nurtured a precocious love of cinema. She decided to call the filmmaker back: Perhaps he could give her some advice on her dream of making films? At the restaurant Le Hangar, in the Marais neighborhood of Paris, where they met, "he looked at me like a miracle." According to her account, he immediately made grand declarations to her: "He announced that he was going to make all his films with me, that he'd help me write mine, that he wanted to have me with him and in front of him all the time." He was disappointed when he learned her age: He thought she was younger.
Six years later, in 2019, it was a young woman traumatized by her relationship with the director who fled to Austria. "I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder." In January 2024, she discovered Judith Godrèche's accusations about her past relationship with Jacquot, which prompted the opening of a preliminary investigation on Wednesday, February 7. She in turn decided to speak out publicly about her experiences with the director, which included manipulation, domination, physical violence and sexual harassment. Some of her accusations may not be covered by the statute of limitations.
At first, their relationship took the form of a professional friendship, a kind of mentorship, whereby the director wanted to help the student make films. He invited her to Venice in 2013, as he did with Godrèche in 1987. "On the sleeper train, he approached me physically. I was uncomfortable, I found it strange given our age difference."
In 2015, on the set of A Jamais (Never Ever), a film for which Roy was the screenwriter and in which she stars opposite Mathieu Amalric, she experienced her first traumatic episode. "In a hotel room in the Algarve in Portugal, he started insulting me, calling me a whore and a slut," she said. There were three more films after that, until her escape in 2019. In the press at the time, Roy was described as Jacquot's "new muse."
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