French actress Catherine Deneuve has become the face of the letter published in Le Monde last week, signed by 100 prominent French women, which criticized the “Me Too” movement for being “puritanical.” After the backlash, Deneuve has written a new letter, offering her apologies to the victims of sexual harassment — and them alone.
The letter dominated headlines last week. It was attributed to no single author, but was signed by 100 influential women in France, including journalists, writers, psychologists, and other actresses. To the global audience, however, Deneuve was the most recognizable name on the list.
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The letter decried the “Me Too” movement for “infantilizing” women, infringing on “sexual freedom,” and leading to a new age of “witch hunts” and “puritanism.” It argued for mens’ “indispensable freedom to offend and bother” women.
Feminists and advocates for the “Me Too” movement and the Time’s Up campaign summarily denounced the letter, and Deneuve along with it. In response, Deneuve, who is 74, penned a new essay, published on Sunday in the French newspaper Liberation.
“I am a free woman and I will remain so, Deneuve wrote. “I fraternally salute all the victims of odious acts that may have felt aggrieved by this letter published in Le Monde. It is to them and to them alone that I apologize.”
Deneuve went on to clarify her position, which mirrored many of the aspects of the first letter that bothered readers.
“I do not like this characteristic of our time… when simple denunciations on social networks generate punishment, resignation and often media lynching,” she wrote. “An actor can be digitally erased from a movie, the director of a large New York institution may have to resign for hands to the buttocks put there thirty years ago without any other form of trial. I do not excuse anything, [but] I do not decide on the guilt of these men because I am not qualified to. And few are.”
Deneuve was apparently intent on distancing herself from other opponents of the Me Too movement, writing: “I would like to say to conservatives, racists, and traditionalists of all kinds who have found it strategic to support me that I am not fooled. They will have neither my gratitude nor my friendship.”
