French director is accused of drugging and raping actress
New charges brought as eight other women accuse Luc Besson of assault and harassment
FRENCH film director Luc Besson yesterday denied raping or drugging a young actress in his first public reaction to the allegations.
The tearful denial came four days after a judge reopened a rape investigation into the maker of The Fifth Element, which was brought by the Dutch-belgian actress Sand Van Roy, who claimed that Mr Besson had repeatedly raped her over a two-year period.
Paris prosecutors had dropped the case due to lack of evidence eight months ago, but Ms Van Roy filed for fresh charges. “For those who thought that the Luc Besson affair was over, it has only just begun,” she announced to the press.
The actress is one of nine women who allege they were assaulted or harassed by one of the most powerful figures in French cinema.
Ms Van Roy, 28, had minor roles in his films Taxi 5 and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
Mr Besson has admitted having a relationship with Van Roy but denied he had raped her. “I did not rape that woman, I have never raped a woman in my life,” he told BFMTV. “I have never lifted a hand to a woman, I have never threatened a woman... I never drugged this woman, as has been said,” he said in extracts from the interview.
In an emotional exchange, Mr Besson, 60, who is bringing out an autobiography this week called Enfant Terrible, said he had a relationship with Ms Van Roy and had made “some mistakes”.
“I betrayed my wife and my children. It did not only happen once, it happened several times during our 20 years of marriage,” he added, paying tribute to his wife Virginie for sticking with him despite his affairs.
“I looked at myself and said: ‘You have lied to the people you love.’ I did what I should have done for the past 40 years and had always refused to do: go and see a shrink.”
Ms Van Roy first filed a complaint with police in May 2018 after spending the night with Mr Besson in a luxury Paris hotel. Two months later she said that she had been raped four times during “a controlling professional relationship” with the director that lasted two years. Fears for her career kept her from speaking out, she said.
Police questioned Mr Besson about the accusations in October 2018. One actress later told prosecutors that she had to escape on “her hands and knees” from an audition in Besson’s Paris office in 2002.
A source close to the new investigation told AFP that preliminary inquiries into accusations by another woman are still under way in Paris.
In an interview with news magazine Nouvel Obs,
Ms Van Roy said: “He was like a guru; I was under his sway. He was constantly checking my whereabouts.”
Last July, a 49-year-old casting director told the investigative website Mediapart that the director assaulted her “every time I took the lift with him”, and that he also demanded sexual favours from her on set. Two other women also told Mediapart that Besson “behaved inappropriately” with them. Mr Besson has denied any wrongdoing.
Besides his legal woes, Mr Besson is facing financial ruin after a series of box-office failures that have plunged his 20-year-old film studio Europacorp to the brink of bankruptcy. He has been in talks to cede a controlling stake in the studio, located in a northern Paris suburb, to an American investment fund after it ran up losses of €200million (£179m) in two years.
Despite the losses, he reportedly paid himself a salary of €5.8m (£5.2m) last year.
Europacorp previously held discussions with several high-profile companies, including Netflix, but the talks froze after the rape allegations emerged.
‘He was like a guru; I was under his sway’