Jon Henley in Paris
Friday November 4, 2005
The Guardian
An acclaimed French film director credited with discovering Vanessa Paradis appeared in a Paris court yesterday accused by four young actresses of forcing them to masturbate as part of their screen tests.
Jean-Claude Brisseau denies the charges of sexual harassment and sexual assault, insisting in newspaper interviews that the "erotic auditions", held between 1996 and 2001 for his 2002 feature Choses Secrètes, were justified artistically and "indispensable" to his work.
Mr Brisseau, 61, who cast a teenage Paradis, who is married to Johnny Depp, in his 1989 film Noce Blanche, has twice won awards at Cannes and been nominated for the prestigious Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival.
But the four actresses, two of whom allege the director also tricked them into working for him for nothing, say he abused his authority to gain sexual favours. One told the court Mr Brisseau often asked her to masturbate in front of him, sometimes in public places. She said she did 20 or 30 such "tests" between 1996 and 2001, some of them with another young hopeful. Some sessions were filmed by the director. "He said it was good to improvise all these things now, so as not to waste time on the set. And he said his eye was replacing the camera," she said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,1627441,00.html