Adèle Haenel has won a landmark court case against the director Christophe Ruggia, who was convicted on Monday for sexually assaulting the French actress when she was a minor. Ruggia will serve a four-year sentence, two years under house arrest and the rest suspended.

The case was hailed as a milestone for the French courts, as the first major case to confront an accusation of sexual misconduct in the nation’s cinema industry since the emergence of the #MeToo movement in 2017. Haenel first spoke publicly about the accusations in 2019.

Haenel – who has starred in films including Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Deerskin and 120 BPM – has been outspoken about the problem of misogyny and sexual misconduct in film. In 2020, she led a walk-out at the César Awards, in protest against a prize awarded to Roman Polanski. In 2022, she announced she was distancing herself from the world of cinema entirely, as she was no longer able to be part of an industry that “defends a capitalist, patriarchal, racist, sexist world of structural inequality”.

Ruggia’s guilty verdict was delivered by head judge Gilles Fonrouge, who said: “You took advantage of the influence you had on the young actress Adèle Haenel.” In addition to the sentence, Ruggia was ordered to pay €50,000 in damages.

Outside the courtroom, where Haenel was met by a crowd of supporters, she stopped to address the crowd. “Thank you all for coming, and for advancing human rights, by your presence, and the fact that we don’t give up,” she said, as reported by the New York Times. “We’re in this together.”

Ruggia cast Haenel in his film The Devils – about a borderline incestuous relationship – in 2002, when she was 12 and he was 36. Reportedly, she continued to visit the filmmaker for three years after filming finished, regularly spending Saturdays at his apartment, where he was supposed to be teaching her about classics of French cinema. Haenel has accused him of making “sexualised moves” toward her at this time, describing the sessions as a ruse for sexual assault.

In court, she said that speaking up for her 12-year-old self and other child victims was the “most important thing I’ve done in my life – trying to break the loneliness of children”. After severing ties with Ruggia at the age of 15, she described experiencing shame and depression, amplified by a culture of silence: “It makes you want to die, in fact, when no one speaks.”

Ruggia dismissed Haenel’s account as “pure lies”. According to his lawyer, he plans to appeal the conviction.