Martinez said he spent 40 years “wearing the mask of someone else” and “seeking to hide something that was like a cancer inside me.”
A few years ago, he felt he needed to speak out because he was fed up with keeping the trauma inside him.
“I thought: I need to do something. It’s not possible to continue like that,” he said.
The play was shown for the first time at the Avignon arts festival in 2019. That is also when he first told his two sons, now 21 and 11, about the abuse. Since then, Martinez’s play has been playing in theaters in Paris and across France and a performance of it was shown on France’s Catholic television network KTO.
“I’ve been in pain for so long, and now I’m an actor so … I’m acting my pain. I’m not in it anymore,” he said.
In recent weeks, Martinez, who lost his faith following the abuse, made a new, decisive step. After much hesitation, he asked the head of the Conference of Bishops of France, Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, whether he could seek Martinez’ forgiveness in the name of his abuser.
“He accepted and it was tremendous emotionally for everybody that night,” Martinez remembers. “I gave my forgiveness to the priest that raped me.”
After that, “I felt really completely free of the whole burden of anger, of the desire of revenge. All the bad feelings I had just had vanished, just because I had forgiven,” he said.
“Little by little the trauma is disappearing,” Martinez added. “What helped more was to be able to forgive the priest.”
The actor had been previously in touch with Moulins-Beaufort, who supported the play and offered to show it to French bishops as part of the church’s efforts to face up to shameful secrets that were long covered up.
