A week after the trial of Christophe Ruggia, tried for sexual assault on Adèle Haenel when she was between 12 and 14 years old, the actress, aged 35 today, took the floor to look back on these two days of eventful hearings.
“I am the representative of this child who disappeared, whom no one protected. No adult took responsibility,” she explained, her voice filled with emotion, this Monday, December 16 on France Inter.
Director Christophe Ruggia is accused of having sexually assaulted Adèle Haenel, between 2001 and 2004, after the filming of the film “Les Diables” in which the teenager, aged 12 at the time, was the main actress. During this period, she went every Saturday or almost to the director's home, where the attacks took place.
“Shut up in the media sphere”
“We are talking about an adult who organizes himself to have a 12-year-old child in his home alone and sexually assault her every weekend,” she insisted on the microphone of Sonia Devillers, estimating that “the Ruggia's line of defense is to sexualize the child. “I never had the opportunity to be that 12-year-old kid, he was adultized all the time,” she continued.
When she “started speaking in 2019,” the actress explained that she spoke first “as a woman.” “And I realized later that I was 12 years old. I forgot so much that I was ever 12 years old,” she said, adding that director Christophe Ruggia told her several times that she was “an adult in a child’s body”.
Adèle Haenel also regretted that the presumption of innocence, which “has value in the judicial framework”, is “used in an extrajudicial framework to tell us (the victims of sexual violence) to keep quiet”. “That should not prevent us from speaking out in the media, from expressing ourselves,” insisted the 35-year-old actress. “The axis of defense was keep quiet in the media sphere. They are tools of silencing,” she added.
“A man who murdered the child I was”
On Tuesday, Adèle Haenel, who had painfully contained her rage since the start of the trial, contenting herself with staring at Christophe Ruggia with a dark look that he avoided, finally let it explode at the beginning of the afternoon. “But shut up!” “, she yelled at the director, furious, hitting the table in front of her with the flat of her hands.
The director had just explained that he had tried to protect her from the fallout from his film “The Devils” in 2001, in which she had played sex scenes at age 12, just before the start of the attacks denounced. “You have to see the violence that it is, to hear all these lies accumulated by a man who murdered the child that I was, who made him disappear,” she explained on France Inter , this Monday morning.
The Paris criminal court will deliver its judgment on February 3. The prosecution demanded a five-year prison sentence against Christophe Ruggia, including two farms placed directly under an electronic bracelet, which means that the 59-year-old man would not go to prison if the court followed these requisitions. The defense pleaded for acquittal.
To determine the “fair sentence”, said prosecutor Camille Poch, it will be necessary to take into account the time spent – more than 20 years -, but also “the absence of recognition of the facts” at the director's hearing, “their seriousness, their recurrence, the repeated number” of the attacks, the fact that they “only stopped at the initiative of the complainant”, she repeated during the requisitions.
