For French justice, the investigation was closed in 2022 by the Paris prosecutor’s office, because the alleged facts were prescribed. But Coline Berry was heard Thursday at the National Assembly, as part of a commission of inquiry into incestuous sexual violence.
In a poignant, raw, sometimes unbearable testimony, she delivered her accusations against her father, the actor Richard Berry.
“I was born from violence. Before I was even born, my father had smashed my mother’s head against a sink. Then he hit her, 7 months pregnant, he punched her in the stomach, he perforated her eardrum. It is in this violence that I came into the world. (…) This is the starting point,” began Coline Berry in her chilling story, reports RTL.
The daughter that the actor had with Catherine Hiegel in 1976 underlined the omerta, the silence in the family on the side of Richard Berry, whom she says she prefers to call the “clan”, with a father figure who is not touched.
Then, her voice sometimes on the verge of breaking, she told of the abuse, when she was a little girl. “I was made to play. But the orchestra’s games were not games. These were rapes, repeated, almost every weekend. My father’s penis in my mouth like a trumpet or a flute. I still remember the smell today. The memory of sensations. The memory of images.” And to underline: “I grew up without any intimate reference points, without limits, without protection”.
Coline Berry once again recounted the survival strategies that she tried to implement as a child, even if it meant risking death. “When I was 10, I stopped eating during school holidays so he could take me back to my mother.”
Coline Berry spoke out again on the limitation period, which in her case meant the dismissal of her complaint against her father, explains Franceinfo. “The courts told me it was too late. But too late for whom? Whose right to be forgotten?” she asked the deputies. And to say he is in favor of “imprescriptibility and for the removal of the non-retroactivity of laws for yesterday’s victims”.
Presumed innocent, Richard Berry has always contested his daughter’s accusations.
