French filmmaker arrested for alleged sexual assault

PARIS (Reuters) – French director Christophe Ruggia was taken into police custody on Tuesday, the Paris prosecutor's office said, following allegations that he sexually assaulted a teenage girl who appeared in one of his films ago almost two decades.

Jean-Pierre Versini-Campinchi, Ruggia's lawyer, said the filmmaker has denied any wrongdoing.

Actress Adèle Haenel, now 31, alleged that Ruggia assaulted and harassed her between 2001 and 2004 after she was cast in a film Ruggia directed called “The Devils.”

According to Haenel's allegations, published in French media outlet Mediapart in November last year, when she was first harassed she was 12 and the abuse continued until she was 15 .

In November, the Paris prosecutor's office opened a preliminary investigation into “sexual assault on a minor under the age of 15 by a person in authority and sexual harassment”.

Ruggia's arrest came days after French prosecutors opened a separate investigation into child rape allegations that sent shockwaves through French cultural circles.

In a book published this month, Vanessa Springora, now 47 and director of Julliard Editions in France, alleged sexual abuse by Gabriel Matzneff, a prominent 83-year-old author, while she was 14 years old.

Matzneff said Springora falsely portrayed him as a pervert and an abuser.

The #MeToo movement, which began in the wake of the scandal surrounding Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, has sparked a wave of allegations from people saying they were sexually assaulted by people in positions of power.

But the response in France has so far been relatively muted.

While many people in France have adopted the movement, some personalities have not. Actress Catherine Deneuve signed, along with 99 other French women, a 2018 letter saying the #MeToo campaign amounted to “puritanism” and that men had the right to “harass” women.

(Reporting by Matthieu Protard, Sophie Louet and Simon Carraud; editing by Mike Collett-White)