Adèle Haenel retires over French film sector’s ‘complacency’ towards sexual predators

The French actor Adèle Haenel has announced she is leaving the film industry because of its “general complacency” towards sexual predators.

The award-winning star of Portrait of a Lady on Fire said she was turning her retirement into a political statement.

In a letter published in the magazine Telerama, Haenel, 34, said her retirement was a way to call out the French film industry’s failure to deal with “sexual aggressors” and to ostracise women who have come forward to report assaults.

“I decided to politicise my retirement from cinema to denounce the general complacency of the profession towards sexual aggressors and more generally the way in which this sphere collaborates with the mortal, ecocidal, racist order of the world such as it is,” she wrote. She said it was urgent to “raise the alarm”.

She said the French film industry had reacted with indifference to #MeToo accusations.

“They all join hands to save the face of [Gérard] Depardieu, [Roman] Polanski, [Dominique] Boutonnat. It bothers them, it bothers them that the victims make too much noise, they would prefer that we continue to disappear and die in silence,” she wrote.

Depardieu, 74, whose lawyers have denied any criminal behaviour, has been accused of multiple alleged incidents of sexually inappropriate behaviour. Boutonnat, 53, has been sent to trial for an alleged sexual assault of a 21-year-old male – which he denies – in a case that has not been heard. Polanski, 89, lives in France and Switzerland despite an outstanding US warrant for fleeing a court case in which he was convicted of statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl.

“Faced with the monopoly of the words and finances of the bourgeoisie, I have no other weapons than my body and my integrity. This is the meaning of cancel culture: you have the money, the strength and all the glory, you gargle with it, but you will not have me as a spectator. I cancel you out of my world,” said Haenel.

Haenel first came to the public’s attention with her performance in the 2007 film Water Lilies, for which she was nominated for a César. In 2020, she accused French director Christophe Ruggia of sexually assaulting her when she was 12 and had been cast in his film The Devils. Ruggia, 56, who denies the accusations, has been formally put under investigation for “the sexual aggression of a minor”. In 2020, she was signed up by one of Hollywood’s biggest agencies, the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which also represents Scarlett Johansson and George Clooney.

Haenel, who has been nominated for seven Césars and won two, has been absent from cinema screens since the 2020 César ceremony when she walked out of the 45th ceremony in protest at Roman Polanski winning a director’s award for An Officer and a Spy. She shouted “shame!” as she left and was followed by the Portrait of a Lady director Céline Sciamma.

Recently, Haenel has made headlines for her political activism, showing up at protests, blockades and demonstrations against Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular pension law to raise the official retirement age to 64.