Cantat-Trintignant case: “It was in fact a banal feminicide, on the part of a violent man”

This is the story of a word that did not yet exist, “feminicide”. The story also of an omerta which for a very long time surrounded a charismatic singer, a black sun who, behind his aura of a “handsome big mouth” very committed to the left, hid a violent man. It was almost twenty years ago, both nothing and an eternity in terms of societal progress. The actress Marie Trintignant died in the summer of 2003 in Vilnius (Lithuania) under the blows of her lover Bertrand Cantat, on the sidelines of a shoot. He will talk about two slaps back and forth; the autopsy will reveal 19 blows on the disfigured young woman.

There will quickly be two camps: that of French cinema, Jean-Louis Trintignant and his legendary chic and that of a more popular France, the middle class family of the Bordeaux musician, not necessarily making the weight. “The Cantat affair”, which resulted in a detention of four and a half years, had many twists and turns. Marie buried, Cantat in prison, events took a tragic turn in 2010 with the suicide of Krisztina Rady, the singer’s wife. Marie and Krisztina, two women burned by this black sun.

It will however be necessary to wait until 2013, and the implacable revelation of a distress message left by Krisztina on the answering machine of her Hungarian parents, seven minutes to tell her ordeal with Bertrand, this « fou », she will say, to finally let it be understood that Cantat was a violent man. But it was in 2017 that Anne-Sophie Jahn child