At the Ruggia trial, Adèle Haenel’s cry of anger

(Keystone-ATS) The defense pleaded for acquittal and the court will deliver its decision on February 3.

The actress who had painfully contained her rage since the start of the trial, content to stare at Christophe Ruggia with a black look that he avoided, finally let it explode at the beginning of the afternoon.

The cry came from afar and froze the usually more polite courtroom for a moment. “But shut up!” “, jumped up the 35-year-old actress, 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.

“I suggested that she take an assumed name…” he says, before being interrupted by Adèle Haenel’s cry. Who then leaves the room, as an echo of her departure from the César ceremony in 2020 after the nomination of Roman Polanski, who had established her as a symbol of feminists.

The day before, Christophe Ruggia had accused her of “pure lies”, speaking of a “French #Metoo” which would have “fallen” on him, and assuring that the actress had wanted to take “revenge” because he had not not played again after “Les Diables”.

An “absurd defense” sweeps away prosecutor Camille Ploch, who requested that the requested prison sentence be placed directly under an electronic bracelet, which means that he would not go to prison.

“He made the choice to sexually assault. He had all his conscience as a man, as an adult, to act otherwise,” maintains the prosecutor about the 59-year-old defendant – between 36 and 39 at the time.

“Guilty, Guilty, Guilty”

“This hearing must recall the prohibition, who was the adult, who was the child, it must put the world right”, insists the magistrate, who has “no doubt” about the reality of the attacks, described in a “constant” manner by Adèle Haenel, “from 2006” in private.

“He reproached me for the love he had for me,” the actress said. “How heavy it must be to carry when you are 12 years old…” comments the prosecutor.

The actress’s lawyers requested 30,000 euros in compensation for moral damage, and 31,000 for the cost of her psychological follow-up.

In the packed room, the prosecutor evokes the multiple testimonies of the “discomfort” of adults, the writings of “rejected lovers” by Christophe Ruggia. And this “inability” of the director “to detail what happened for hours between an adult man and this pre-teen, 24 years his junior”.

“120 Saturdays” between 2001 and 2004, “his hands under the T-shirt, in the pants of a little girl,” counted Yann Le Bras, one of Adèle Haenel’s lawyers. But according to Mr. Ruggia, adds his other lawyer Anouck Michelin, “it’s the child who has all the wrongs, who is too sensual, too sassy, ​​too dangerous.”

“Adèle, you didn’t discover her, you stole her,” she says to the director, of whom she will only remember “one attitude” at the trial: “your empty, absent look.”

The accusations of Adèle Haenel – in Mediapart in 2019 – “were not spontaneous”, accuses Me Orly Rezlan in defense, but that of a “whistleblower of a Metoo in French cinema”.

In everyone’s eyes, Christophe Ruggia is already “guilty, guilty, guilty”, thunders his second lawyer, Fanny Colin, who fears that the court will be required “to deliver justice with a gun to his head”.

Adèle Haenel and her furious gaze can no longer hold still.

Since the director is a “big liar and he is being asked to shut his mouth”, Me Colin only wants to talk about the “file”.

To call into question “the asserted convictions”, the “fiction” which “permeates reality”, she says, and above all “the memory” which “resurfaces” but which is not “sufficient to enter into the process of condemnation” .

End of trial. Adèle Haenel leaves the courtroom without a word, to applause.