Nicolas Bedos makes big gestures at the bar, turns left, then right, mimes a scene, rolls his Rs: sexual assault? It doesn’t look “rrrrnothing” like him.
He has no memory of what happened on the night of June 1 to 2, 2023, on the dance floor of the Sauvages private club, a trendy establishment in the heart of the capital: “If it were cinema, this would be blurry spots of color,” explains the director. When he drinks, he has blackouts.
It is therefore the complainant, Mélodie A., who describes to the court a scene that remains engraved in her memory. That evening, the young actress at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art arrived at Sauvages around 11 p.m., with her brother and a few friends. While she is dancing, a man who is visibly very drunk walks towards her and places his hand on her penis, over his pants. Stunned, she pushes him away and yells at him to go get treatment. “What? Are you going to hit me?” the director would have replied, before a security guard intervened and kicked him out.
Facing the judges, Nicolas Bedos, who celebrated the announcement of his partner’s pregnancy that evening, assured that he had no sexual intentions: “I may have acted like a big drunk, but I am not a sexual abuser. I probably brushed against her unintentionally, that can happen on a dance floor.”
The witnesses present did not see any inappropriate gesture, but all witnessed the screams and tears of the young woman. She still sheds tears in the audience when she was asked to mime the scene. “My job is to watch actors,” says Nicolas Bedos with emphasis. I can clearly see that she is sincere… If what she felt was that I, the famous director, with his shitty notoriety, crushed her, the young actress, with my power and my money, obviously it’s traumatic…”
The president of the court asks if it is possible that the complainant misinterpreted her gesture. “But obviously! proclaims the playwright. What, I would have crossed the entire dance floor to touch a woman’s vagina, in front of everyone, GIVEN WHO I AM?”
I know you weren’t sober but that doesn’t excuse your attitude, be careful because something could happen to you
During the investigation, numerous witnesses painted an unflattering portrait of the defendant, regularly drunk in the evening, staggering, shouting, eating from customers’ plates or urinating on the rooftop of Montana, another select club in the capital. .
A waitress from the Sauvages private club is also called to the bar. Emma G. recalls an incident with Nicolas Bedos on the night of May 11 to 12, 2023, three weeks before the facts reported by Mélodie A. That evening, the director ordered her a whiskey and coke. As she turns her back on him to get her drink, she feels a hand take her by the waist, and a kiss planted on her neck. She turns around and faces the screenwriter, who presses his chest to hers. “I didn’t understand,” Emma G. told the court. We had no contact or exchanges before”. The next day, she wrote a message that she did not ultimately send, but that the police found in her cell phone: ““Hi Nicolas, I really like your films, I also like your frank talk but take care of yourself and to the others when you go to parties because yesterday you kissed me on the neck. I know you weren’t sober but that doesn’t excuse your attitude, be careful because something could happen to you and I would be disappointed not to see your films anymore”
The president asks her if she experienced it as a sexual assault. “I felt it as an attack,” she replies. Subsequently, I felt distrust and fear towards the male clientele of the club”. Here again, Nicolas Bedos invokes a black hole due to alcohol: “I don’t question his word, I simply have no memory of it,” he says. I’m often like that in the evenings, when I’ve been drinking. I can mean “nocturnal tenderness”, but it is never in a sexual context!”
His lawyer asks him what, in his opinion, would constitute sexual assault: “It would be kissing someone on the mouth, or on the chest, touching their buttocks… something that would not be tender and friendly,” explains the director, before to concede “that if all the customers kissed the waitress on the neck, it would not be acceptable”.
Emma G. did not file a complaint at the time, but she plans to become a civil party, to support the procedure initiated by Mélodie A.
It’s flirting, a failed seduction under the influence of alcohol!
This is also the wish of a third young woman: Clémence H., who came forward shortly after filing the complaint against the screenwriter. At the hearing, she recounts a trying evening, on June 14, 2018, at the home of actor Gilles Lellouche. There she meets Nicolas Bedos who allegedly said to her “Who are you?” before touching her stomach, on the strip of bare skin between her t-shirt and the top of her jeans. He then allegedly followed her to the toilet, asked if he could kiss her, which the young woman refused. A little later, when he comes to sit next to her again, she hands him a glass of water. Bedos allegedly took a sip of it, before spitting it in his face.
And the screenwriter comes back to the stand a third time, explaining again that he doesn’t remember anything. The facts could constitute sexual harassment, which he forcefully denies: “It’s flirting, a failed seduction under the influence of alcohol! I live with some kind of demon inside me, but I am not a sexual abuser”
“This is not a predator’s file, it’s a drunkard’s file!” adds his lawyer, Me Julia Minkowski.
No trace of assault in any case on his criminal record. However, it bears the mention of three convictions, for driving while drunk (2010), public insult (2012) and death threats (2014). Alcohol, always. Urged by his lawyer, Nicolas Bedos explains that he suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorders at the age of 13 or 14, which “ruined his youth and his emotional life”. He also mentions depression, suicide attempts at the age of 20, and a sexual assault which he refuses to talk about.
“My name has been smeared in the media. I was portrayed as a terrible man. I no longer have a job, no more professional projects. I’m canceled,” says the director. He also assures that for a year and a half, he has stopped drinking alcohol, and that he lives far from Paris. “No one is going to see me again in a bar, a restaurant or a nightclub!”
The prosecutor denounces the “navel-gazing” and “incessant verbiage” of the defendant, and castigates his line of defense, consisting of saying that he does not remember anything, while being convinced of having done nothing: “There would be serious sexual assaults, and others not serious? asks the magistrate ironically. We must listen to these young women, and not wait for them to experience something even more serious.”
He requires 1 year in prison, accompanied by an obligation of care for Nicolas Bedos. The court will deliver its decision on October 22.
