Award-winning French actress and director Ariane Labed, who lives and works in Greece, has issued a deeply personal testimony about sexual violence, linking her own experiences to broader concerns about how rape cases are handled in the Greek judicial system. Writing in the Greek daily Kathimerini, Labed, who is also the wife of acclaimed filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, described appearing in a Greek courtroom as a defence witness in a rape trial and confronting devastating systemic failures.
Labed begins by introducing herself as such: "I have received various important awards, have worked with several 'great' filmmakers, and my own films have been featured at many different festivals, including at Cannes. Nevertheless, I am mainly known here in Greece as 'Lanthimos' wife."
The actress then says she was raised to respect public institutions but has grown disillusioned. She recounts deciding in late 2021 to stop drinking, describing alcohol as a way she had long used to avoid confronting what she calls a history of sexual harassment, unwanted touching, and two rapes during her teenage years.
In 2022, she co-founded a French organisation aimed at combating sexist and sexual violence and supporting victims, insisting #MeToo is "a revolution" rather than a passing moment, Labed says. That conviction, she writes, led her to testify for a woman she had known for years in a Greek rape case involving multiple complainants. Labed describes the victim as living with post-traumatic stress and gynaecological problems consistent with severe violence, yet facing scepticism because she had been in a relationship with the alleged perpetrator, despite partner rape being recognised in Greek law since 2006.
In court, Labed says the physical arrangement forced her to pass close to the defendant and stand above him in a way she found chillingly suggestive of power and humiliation. She says the presiding judge focused less on the allegations than on a crowdfunding campaign launched to help fund victims' legal costs, repeatedly framing it as a "trial by the media". She describes the defence lawyer launching an anti-feminist tirade, mocking #MeToo and the slogan "I Believe You". At the same time, the judge allowed the interruptions and ended her testimony with what she calls sarcasm. "I leave the courtroom flooded with rage, which turns into sobs the moment I pass through the gate," she strikingly writes.
"The reason why so many men allow themselves to rape women without compunction is because they have effectively been given the right to – our entire culture lets them get away with it," Labed writes, arguing that courts often treat trauma responses, fragmented memory, and ongoing contact with abusers as evidence against victims, rather than patterns consistent with grooming and coercive control.
The defendant, she writes, was convicted but by a split decision, and later filed SLAPP lawsuits against witnesses and appealed, keeping him out of prison. Despite that, Labed ends by pointing to civil society mobilisation around the case: "We will be there in the next trials too, supporting all victims of sexist and sexual violence who have every right to expect one clear and lifesaving response from the judicial system: 'We Believe You.'"
