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Christophe Ruggia is being prosecuted for sexual assaults from 2001 to 2004 on Adèle Haenel during weekly meetings at his home, in the wake of the intense filming of the auteur film “Les diables,” where the director, 24 years her senior, had offered the young teenager her first role in cinema.
Originally scheduled for just one afternoon last December 19, the appeal hearing had to be rescheduled and will continue on January 23.
The filmmaker is stuck in denial, insisting since day one that he is “neither a sexual aggressor, nor a rapist, nor a pedophile or anything of that nature.”
“If I had done what she accuses me of doing, if I had put my hand in her pants even once, I could never have looked at myself in the mirror and I would have stopped seeing her immediately. That never happened,” Christophe Ruggia protested before the court.
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Childhood wound
To justify Adèle Haenel’s visits to his Paris home every Saturday afternoon, he presented himself as a cultural mentor to a young actress taking her first steps in the industry, eager for advice and to discover the world.
“I have over 5,000 DVDs at home, lots of books (…). We talk about books, films, travels, her school, my projects,” he claimed.
Consistently, from her first public speaking engagement to the electrifying trial in December 2024, Adèle Haenel described the caresses and non-consensual touches by Christophe Ruggia on her teenage body during these meetings.
With downcast eyes, struggling with words, interspersed with silence, the actress, awarded two Césars, revealed in court a trauma symptomatic of children who are victims of sexual violence.
“It makes me ashamed, actually. It makes me ashamed to be so marked. I wish it hadn’t happened, I just wish I could say it didn’t exist,” she confessed, her mouth tensed.
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“I want to stop this depression, to put an end to it, but I don’t know if it will be over. Just live with it. It’s a completely shattered self-image since the age of 12,” she told the judges.
After her most striking role in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (2019) by director Céline Sciamma, which became a feminist and lesbian masterpiece, Adèle Haenel turned away from cinema starting in 2020 to focus on theater and radical left-wing activism.
