A French court convicted the director Christophe Ruggia on Monday of sexually assaulting the actress Adèle Haenel when she was a minor, handing him a four-year sentence — two years under house arrest and the rest suspended.
It was the first major case to examine an accusation of sexual misconduct in French cinema since the #MeToo movement, which emerged in 2017 and was met with a severe backlash in France.
Ms. Haenel did not show any clear emotion when the verdict — which also ordered Mr. Ruggia to pay 50,000 euros, or about $51,300, in damages — was read out. When she left the Paris courthouse, women gathered outside applauded. A lawyer for Mr. Ruggia said that his client planned to appeal.
Mr. Ruggia cast Ms. Haenel in his 2002 film “The Devils,” about a relationship bordering on incest, when she was 12 and he was 36. After the filming finished, she continued to visit him regularly on Saturdays over three years at his apartment, where, she says, he touched her inappropriately and sexually harassed her.
When Ms. Haenel first revealed such accusations publicly in 2019, she was the first major French actress to speak out about her personal story of abuse since the #MeToo movement emerged. She was a rising star, praised for fierce yet sensitive performances that had earned her two Césars, the French equivalent of the Oscars.
Mr. Ruggia was a relatively unknown director, but in the insular world of French cinema, he had a prominent role in the French directors’ association and had a reputation for making films about social justice and for defending migrants and human rights.
The case stirred huge interest in the country. The courtroom was packed with Ms. Haenel’s supporters over a two-day trial in December.
During those two days, two conflicting versions of the past were presented. Ms. Haenel depicted the regular Saturday sessions in Mr. Ruggia’s Paris apartment, where he was meant to teach her the classics of French cinema, as a ruse to sexually assault her.
Mimicking his voice, she recounted how he would caress her thighs, kiss her on the neck while breathing heavily, put his hands under her T-shirt to touch her breasts and her belly, and under her pants to reach the edge of her intimate parts. She broke ties with him when she was 15 and, for years afterward, described experiencing shame and depression.
She said she was speaking in court to defend her former 12-year-old self and other child victims who were hushed into silence, calling it the “most important thing I’ve done in my life — trying to break the loneliness of children.”
“It makes you want to die, in fact, when no one speaks,” said Ms. Haenel, now 35, who often writhed with anger in the courtroom, her face overcome by tics and her feet banging on the floor.
“Shut up!” she screamed at the director at one point, rushing out of the courtroom.
Mr. Ruggia discounted Ms. Haenel’s account as “pure lies.” He said he had formed a deep bond with the young actress and her co-star, Vincent Rottiers, that extended long after filming. He acknowledged having kissed her on the head and grabbing her, but said it had been in a fatherly manner.
“These were affectionate gestures,” he said in court. Only on one occasion, he said, did her T-shirt roll up as she was bouncing around, exposing her chest. He said he had lowered it and asked her to sit on the armchair from then on.
Although he talked about her overpowering sexuality, and he wrote letters to her stating that his heart was broken after she cut ties with him, Mr. Ruggia said he had never been in love with Ms. Haenel.
“For me, Adèle was a kid, a preadolescent,” he said.
Mr. Ruggia argued that Ms. Haenel had been influenced by another director, with whom she later had a romantic relationship, and that she had been pushed to recast their own platonic relationship as inappropriate and grooming.
“I think she was radicalized,” he said, adding: “There needed to be a #MeToo in France, and it had to fall on me.”
Since the publication in 2019 of Ms. Haenel’s story in an extensively researched article in Mediapart, a French investigative site, Mr. Ruggia has been cast out from cinema. He has moved to Brittany in northwestern France to care for his mother and lives off welfare. He said during the court proceedings that he had been waiting years for the trial, “to see if I’m going to get my life back, if I’m going to be able to make films again or not.”
Since her disclosure, Ms. Haenel has also stopped working in cinema. She later explained in a public letter that she believed the industry protected sexual abusers and preferred that victims “disappear and die in silence.”
“I am canceling you from my world,” she wrote.
The trial’s subtext was how the justice system in France deals with perpetrators of sexual assault and their victims. Ms. Haenel initially told her story to a French investigative journalist and said she did not trust the justice system.
The judges asked Ms. Haenel repeatedly why she did not trust the justice system. The prosecutor, noting the packed courtroom, said in her closing statement: “Justice must also fight silence.”