The Paris prosecutor’s office has requested five years in prison, with three years suspended, for French director Christophe Ruggia in relation to accusations by actress Adèle Haenel that he sexually assaulted her when she was a minor.
The sentence request was made on the final day of a dramatic two-day trial in Paris this week, some five years after Haenel went public in 2019 with accusations against Ruggia, accusing him of sexually assaulting her as a teenager after he cast her in his 2002 feature The Devils.
Ruggia is not expected to do jail time but will likely spend the two-year custodial part of the requested sentence under house arrest with an electronic bracelet, if the sentence is upheld. A final sentence will be announced on February 3.
The prosecutor also requested that Ruggia be placed on France’s national sex offender registry, be banned from seeking contact with Haenel and also compensate her.
She said the sentence took into Ruggia’s refusal to recognize the facts laid out in the trial, as well as the gravity and repeated nature of the sexual assaults.
Haenel has accused Ruggia of sexually assaulting and molesting her over the course of three years, beginning with the shoot of The Devils in 2001, when she was 12 and he was 36, and continuing into the promotional and festival tour.
Ruggia, who has denied the accusations, suggested to the court that Haenel’s accusations were “revenge” because he had not made a second film with her, a claim that was brushed aside by her lawyer.
Proceedings were briefly suspended on day two of the trial after Haenel yelled out “Shut your mouth!” and stormed out, when Ruggia was giving evidence in his defence suggesting he had tried to protect her as a teenager and advise her on how to avoid being bullied at school, suggesting she take a stage name.
The trial is seen as a test case for #MeToo case in France.
Haenel put her career on the line when she went public with her accusations against Ruggia at a time when the movement had yet to be embraced in France.
She received little open support from the local film industry at the time and in 2023 announced that she was the quitting the film industry because of its “general complacency” towards sexual predators.
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