The Observer
World 25.08.19 35A decade ago, Zahia Dehar , a French-
Algerian teenager, woke up to fi nd
her picture on the front of France’s
newspapers as the underage girl
caught up in a prostitution scandal
involving members of the national
football squad.
She was an escort that star player
Franck Ribéry was said to have solic-
ited as a “birthday present ” to him-
self. Aged 18 when the scandal broke
- and just 17 at the time of the inci-
dent – Dehar seemed destined to be
defi ned for life by the sordid story.
But she refused to let it defi ne her.
For a young woman, driven to thoughts
of suicide, it was a question of sur-
vival. “I had the choice between killing
myself or going forward. I didn’t want
to kill myself,” she said afterwards.
Today, the 27-year-old model, lin-
gerie designer and muse to the late
Karl Lagerfeld is celebrating her fi rst
fi lm role and has found herself com-
pared to a young Brigitte Bardot.
In Une Fille Facile ( An Easy Girl ),
released in France on Wednesday ,
Dehar plays the liberated Sofi a, who
sleeps with rich men who buy her
gifts; it is set in a steamy summer in
the south of France, featuring sun,
sea, sand and sex, with luxury yachts
and jewels thrown in. One reviewer
said the fi lm had a “classically Gallic
nonchalance when it comes to sex”.
From teenage
escort to the
summer star of
French cinema
At 17, Zahia Dehar was
caught in a football sex
scandal. Now her fi rst
fi l m is t he ta l k of Pa r is
The French culture magazine Les
Inrockuptibles ran a front page with
the headline “ Et dieu créa Zahia ”
(And God created Zahia), a refer-
ence to Roger Vadim ’s 1956 fi lm And
God Created Woman , which launched
Bardot’s career.
“ ‘An easy girl’ is not pejorative: it’s a
woman who submerges herself in her
sexuality like a man. It’s rare to see a
woman like Sofi a celebrated like that,”
Dehar said.
Born in Ghriss , Algeria, Dehar
came to France at the age of 10 with
her mother and younger brother. By
the time she was 16, uninterested in
boys her own age, she made a deci-
sion, she says, to sleep with older men
for money. By night, she frequented
high-class clubs in Paris, returning in
the early hours to change for school.
The fi rst her mother learned of it
was when the scandal broke involving
Ribéry and Karim Benzema , the Real
Madrid striker. “She heard about it on
the television and was very shocked.
But she was never aggressive with me.
She was mostly worried,” Dehar said.
“I was not in a good place until I
told myself that what I did was not
a crime .”
Ribéry and Benzema were investi-
gated and in 2014 the charges against
them were dropped, with the judge
ruling there was insuffi cient proof
they had known Dehar was underage.
Dehar says the affair still haunts
her. “I experienced it as a shock, a
catastrophe ... I had the feeling that
my adult life had barely begun but had
no future,” she told Les Inrockuptibles.
“I felt trapped in a box, the box of
banned, stoned women ... I felt as if I
was a monster that had to be hidden.”
Later, Dehar told Antidote maga-
zine: “I was very ill, I didn’t go out, I
saw nobody ... I was ‘Zahia the whore’.And I knew that, in society, that kind
of woman is seen as diabolic al.”
Instead of being ostracised, how-
ever, Dehar received modelling offers,
inspired the artists Pierre et Gilles to
portray her as Marianne , the symbol
of the French state, and was photo-
graphed by Lagerfeld, who supported
a lingerie collection she launched.
Some critics see art imitating life,
describing Dehar’s role in Une Fille
Facile as that of a blank canvas on
to which the men in the fi lm project
their fantasies, albeit tempered by her
character’s independence and wit.
The fi lm’s writer and director,
Re becca Zlotowski , a member of
the 50/50 collective – a French
organisation set up in response
to #MeToo that rejects the
perceived “Anglo-Saxon
puritanism” of the
US-born movement- says her fi lm is “an
amoral summer story”.
Its subject is “the
question of strength,
power, domination in
all fi elds”, she says.
“To be a feminist, you
don’t need to show female
astronauts or neuro-
surgeons. I like to show
women in extreme femininity,”
Zlotowski says.
The film has highlighted again
the contrary response in France to
#MeToo. After the allegations of
sexual harassment, abuse and rape
against Harvey Weinstein, a num-
ber of high-profi le French women,
including the actress Catherine
Deneuve, accused feminist cam-
paigners of attacking men’s “right”
to hit on women.
Zlotowski told the Hollywood
Reporter : “We have a Latin culture that
always feels a little bit threatened by
American puritanism ... [The French ]
want to keep their wild sexuality.” She
maintains the most powerful tools to
combat sexism and misogyny are
“economics ... and humour”.
However, the French feminist
group Osez le Féminisme! strongly
disagrees that sex work is empow-
ering. “Zahia Dehar is perhaps a par-
ticular case, ” said Céline Piques, a
spokesperson for the group, “ but at
least 90% of women in prostitution
are forced into it; trafficked, held
against their will and raped. There’s
a great difference between seduction
and sexual violence, that has nothing
to do with puritanism. It’s a message
we keep hammering home .”ABOVE
Zahia Dehar,
left, with co-star
Mina Farid in the
fi lm. Photograph
by Julian Torresy/
AlamyBELOW
Dehar, left,
with the
French director
of Une Fille
Facile, Rebecca
Zlotowski.their fantasies,a
character’s inde
The fi lm’s
Re becca Zlo
the 50/ 50
organisatio
to #MeT
perce
pur
US- am
It
q
p
all
“To
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astron
surge
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becca
i.Kim Willsher
ParisNasa is investigating a claim that an
astronaut living on the International
Space Station accessed the bank
account of her estranged partner.
The case appears to be the fi rst alle-
gation of a crime committed in space,
according to the New York Times.
Anne McClain acknowledges she
accessed the account while she was
on board the ISS but denies any
wrongdoing. Through a lawyer she
has insisted she was merely shep-
herding the couple’s still-intertwined
First crime in space? Orbiting astronaut accused of identity theft
fi nances. McClain has since returned
to Earth after completing her six-
month mission.
Her estranged spouse, Summer
Worden, is said to have filed a
complaint with the Federal Trade
Commission. According to Worden,
her bank account was accessed with-
out her permission from a Nasa-
affi liated computer network. A family
member also fi led a complaint with
Nasa ’s internal Offi ce of Inspector
General and has accused McClain of
identity theft and improper access to
Worden’s private fi nancial records,
according to the newspaper.Before their separation, McClain
had been helping to raise Worden’s
young son from a previous relation-
ship and provided fi nancial support.
Her lawyer said she accessed the bank
account because she was making sure
the family’s fi nances were in order
and there was enough money to pay
bills and care for Worden’s son. She
was unaware Worden had requested
she no longer access the account.
“She strenuously denies that she
did anything improper,” said her
lawyer, Rusty Hardin, adding that
McClain was “totally co-operating”.
McClain launched on a Soyuz rocketto the ISS on 3 December 2018 and
performed her fi rst spacewalk with
Nick Hague in March. She was sched-
uled to perform a second “extrave-
hicular activity” on 29 March, with
Christina Koch, which would havebeen the fi rst all-female spacewalk
but spacesuit sizing issues resulted
in its cancellation. McClain returned
to Earth on 24 June.
The fi ve space agencies who are
involved in building and running
the space station – the US, Russia,
Japan, the European Space Agency
and Canada – have established pro-
cedures to handle legal issues that
arise when astronauts are orbiting
Earth. However, Mark Sundahl, direc-
tor of the Global Space Law Center
at Cleveland State University, said he
was not aware of any previous alle-
gation of a crime committed in space.Robin McKie
Science EditorAnne McClain,
who spent six
months on the
International
Space Station,
denies any
wrongdoing.