French film star Catherine Deneuve, who touched off a worldwide feminist backlash over an open letter she had signed bashing the #MeToo movement, apologized to victims of sexual assault and said there was “nothing good” about harassment.
“I warmly greet all the victims of these hideous acts who might have felt offended by that letter, which appeared in Le Monde” on Tuesday, the actress said in a letter published on Sunday on the Web site of French daily Liberation. “It is to them and them alone that I offer my apologies.”
Deneuve also said that there was “nothing in the letter” to Le Monde that said “anything good about harassment, otherwise I wouldn’t have signed it.”
LYNCHING
France’s most revered actress was among 100 prominent women to sign the open letter defending a man’s right to “bother” women, complaining that the campaign against harassment had become “puritanical.”
They deplored the wave of “denunciations” which has followed claims that Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein sexually assaulted and harassed women over decades, branding it a “witch-hunt” that they claim threatens sexual freedom.
“I love freedom,” Deneuve wrote in the letter to Liberation. “I don’t like this characteristic of our era where everyone feels they have the right... to condemn. An era where simple denunciations on social networks cause punishment, resignation, and... often media lynching,” she wrote.
She also protested not being considered a feminist, saying that she had been among the women who had signed the I had an abortion manifesto in defense of abortion rights written by French feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir.
Other signatories of the Le Monde letter, including author Catherine Millet and actress Catherine Robbe-Grillet, welcomed Deneuve’s response, saying the episode had “reaffirmed the need to preserve sexual freedom and fight media lynching.”
LOBOTOMIZED
The letter they signed “does not claim harassment is good,” they said.
The letter in Le Monde triggered a wave of protest from feminists and victims of harassment and assault worldwide, including one of the women who has accused Weinstein of rape.
“Deneuve and other French women tell the world how their interiorised misogyny has lobotomised them to the point of no return,” Italian actress Asia Argento, who was among the first to denounce Weinstein, said in a tweet.
The letter’s assertions that being “fondled on a metro... was a non-event” to some women, and a man’s right to hit on a woman was fundamental to sexual freedom, sparked particular fury.
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