Around a hundred demonstrators, including Judith Godrèche, are calling for the departure of Dominique Boutonnat, president of the president of the National Center for Cinema and Animated Images, indicted for sexual assault on his godson.
“Separating the man from the CNC”. It is with numerous signs and slogans of the same ilk that around a hundred people demonstrated this Monday, May 13 in front of the National Center for Cinema and Animated Images to demand the removal of its president, Dominique Boutonnat. Among the demonstrators were Judith Godrèche, actress and director who has become a spokesperson for the fight against sexual violence in cinema since she filed a complaint against directors Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon.
Dominique Boutonnat is accused by his godson, with whom he has no family ties, of sexual assault. He accuses the film producer of assaulting him in 2019, when he was 21 years old. The president of the CNC, a major public establishment in the landscape of French audiovisual and cinematographic creation, denies the facts and pleads “consensual kisses” and “gestures of affection that he stopped when he felt from his godson that this gesture could have degenerated into something else.” Despite the accusations and his indictment in 2021, his mandate was renewed in 2022 and he will appear on June 14 in this case.
Last February, Judith Godrèche was publicly indignant before the Senate and requested her dismissal: “Dominique Boutonnat is the president of the CNC, an institution where producers go, sometimes laughing and saying to themselves: ‘It’s funny , I’m going to go and do training against sexual violence in an institution whose president is himself accused of sexual violence’ What’s this joke?” Heard this Monday by the management of the CNC, Judith Godrèche said in Libération to have “spoken, but not to have been heard. Now that we have spoken, the word continues to live on its own.”
“There is a commission of inquiry voted by the National Assembly to support and see how to improve our practices, underlined Fanny de Casimacker, general delegate of the Collective 50/50, to Agence France Presse. So it is completely incoherent that, in this dynamic, at the presidency of the CNC there is still a person who is accused of sexual assault
For their part, the organizers of the mobilization on Monday, May 13, reported in Libération that “if Dominique Boutonnat benefits from the presumption of innocence, it nevertheless seems essential to us that our main institution sets an example.”
