Thread by @WomenReadWomen

Luc Besson met Maïwenn Le Besco when she was 12.

They married when she was only 15 and she gave birth at 16.

"Léon: The Professional" was based on their relationship.

Besson left her three years later for Milla Jovovich during the filming of "The Fifth Element."

The original cut of "Léon" had scenes which portray 12 year-old Mathilda as highly sexual, attempting to seduce Léon.

These scenes were cut from the US release because they "tested very poorly" with American audiences, but were included in the 1996 European release.

When the film was first tested in LA, it incuded a scene where Mathilda asks Léon to be her lover. However, the audience became extremely uncomfortable and began to laugh nervously. The film received terrible test scores at the screening, and Besson cut it for theatrical release.

"Léon: The Professional" was Natalie Portman's motion picture debut. She was 11 when she was cast.

At 13 she received "rape fantasies" in the mail. A local radio station started a countdown to her 18th birthday, when she would be "legal".

Luc Besson was never "cancelled" for impregnating 15 year-old Maïwenn.

On December 9, multiple rape allegations against him were dismissed.
Dutch actress Sand Van Roy and eight other women said they had been assaulted or harassed by Besson over the years.
hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-n…

France (like most of the world) has a long history of child marriage — legally binding young girls to adult men who rape them — but notably, this agenda has been openly pushed by intellectual elites for decades and continues to be an issue to this day.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_pe…

French intellectual Foucault was discovered to be a serial child sexual abuser, a paedophile who raped Arab children while living in Tunisia in the late 1960s.

(His work is still widely cited by queer theorists who support gender ideology.)
thetimes.co.uk/article/french…

In 2017, when an 11 year-old girl was raped by a 28 year-old man, the case was not treated as rape.

Defense lawyers argued that she was "nearly 12 years old," and added: "We are not dealing with a sexual predator on a poor little faultless goose."
amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/55…

In 2020, French writer Gabriel Matzneff came under investigation for his pedophilia.
For decades, he was celebrated for talking openly about stalking teenage girls outside schools in Paris and having sexual contact with 8-year-old boys in the Philippines.
nytimes.com/2020/02/11/wor…

When Francesca Gee sought out book publishers for her account of how, as a teenager, she was lured into a toxic relationship with writer Gabriel Matzneff when he was 20 years her senior, she was shut out of the industry and had to self-publish.

thetimes.co.uk/article/france…

Earlier this year, protests broke out across France calling for revisions to age of consent laws after a woman came forward with claims that she was raped by 20 firefighters when she was between the ages of 13 - 15.

theguardian.com/world/2021/feb…

French courts ruled that 20 firefighters accused of raping a girl when she was aged 13 - 15 should be charged with the lesser offense of "sexual assault without violence, constraint, threat or surprise," with a maximum 7 year sentence, rather than rape.

theguardian.com/world/2021/mar…

*Edit*
Luc Besson met Maïwenn Le Besco when she was 12 and he was 29. They began dating when she was only 15 and he was 32; she was 16 when they married.

Natalie Portman’s parents had demanded numerous changes to the script because of sexual content.
theverge.com/2018/5/20/1737…