The French actor Gérard Depardieu will sit in the dock next October for the alleged sexual assaults on two women during the filming of a film in 2021, as sources from the Prosecutor’s Office confirmed to this newspaper yesterday. … Paris. After having testified before the judicial police and being detained for several hours, the veteran actor was given the judicial summons from the correctional court that will try him. Depardieu left the police station discreetly in the afternoon.
The 75-year-old interpreter is accused of “sexual assaults likely to have been committed” in September 2021 during the filming of the film ‘Les volets verts’ by Jean Becker. This will be the first time that the actor, denounced in recent years by several women for sexual assault and rape, faces criminal proceedings for one of these cases.
Amélie, a 53-year-old French film decorator, filed a complaint last February against Depardieu for “sexual assault, sexual harassment and sexist insults” during the filming of the aforementioned film based on the novel ‘The Green Blinds’ by Georges Simenon. The facts would not have prescribed in this case, unlike other previous cases.
According to the complaint, the actor, who was sitting on the floor in a hallway, forcefully trapped Amélie with his legs as if she were “a wolf trap” and took the opportunity to reach out and touch her waist, breasts and ass. “I’m going to stick my big umbrella in your pussy” (sic), Depardieu reportedly told his alleged victim.
At the moment, the circumstances under which the other alleged sexual assault took place during the filming of ‘Les volets verts’ have not been revealed. According to the newspaper Mediapart, it would be an assistant director who would also have filed a complaint against the famous actor for “sexual violence.”
Depardieu accumulates a long list of police and judicial proceedings for sexual harassment and assault – some media speak of the existence of at least twenty alleged victims. Until recently considered a sacred monster of French cinema, he was charged in December 2020 with “rape and sexual assault”, following the complaint filed in 2018 by the French actress Charlotte Arnould. This young woman accused the actor of having raped her twice in her house in Paris.
Spanish case
Numerous women have taken legal action against Depardieu in recent years for similar acts. Among the complainants is the Spanish journalist Ruth Baza, who declared that the actor had penetrated her with his fingers while she was interviewing him in 1995 for the magazine ‘Cinemanía’.
Winner of two César awards for best actor for ‘The Last Metro’ and ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’, Depardieu published an open letter in a French newspaper in October 2023 in which he flatly denied the accusations against him. “I am neither a rapist nor a predator,” he said then. In the midst of a media storm, French President Emmanuel Macron came out in his defense two months later, provoking outrage among French feminists. The president, who denounced “a manhunt,” recalled that in France there is the presumption of innocence.
#Argentina
