Gérard Depardieu to stand trial over sexual assault allegations
Gérard Depardieu will face a criminal trial in October over the alleged sexual assaults of two women on the set of a film in 2021, prosecutors have announced.
Depardieu, 75, who previously has denied any wrongdoing, was questioned for several hours on Monday by officers at a police station in the 14th arrondissement of Paris.
The Paris public prosecutor’s office later said in a statement that the actor has been “summoned to appear before the criminal court”.
A trial will start in October “for sexual assaults likely to have been committed in September 2021” against “two victims, on the set of the film Les Volets Verts [The Green Shutters]”, the statement said.
Depardieu’s lawyer, Christian Saint-Palais, on Monday evening confirmed the questioning was over as he spoke to reporters as he left the station. “The police custody is over. He is no longer held in the police station,” he said.
The first woman, a set designer, said Depardieu assaulted her when she was a member of the crew of Les Volets Verts. She filed a formal complaint to the police in February.
The 53-year-old woman told the investigative website Mediapart earlier this year that Depardieu first made obscene comments to her, then later assaulted her as she stepped away from the set and into a corridor inside a Paris mansion where the film was being shot.
She said he grabbed her “brutally” and closed his legs around her with a “phenomenal force” so she could not move, then grabbed all parts of her body as he made explicit comments.
She said she felt as if she was in a trap, panicking and struggling to breathe. She said she felt herself pulled backwards and someone else pulling Depardieu, and said his bodyguards had pulled him off her.
Depardieu, through his lawyers, has denied all allegations.
In 2020 police placed Depardieu under formal investigation for rape and sexual assault in another case, after the actor Charlotte Arnould alleged he raped her at his Paris home in 2018.
Arnould, who went to the police more than five years ago, accused Depardieu of rape and sexual assault on two occasions at his home in Paris in 2018, when she was 22 and Depardieu, a friend of her father, was 70.
Arnould told a documentary last year that she had been anorexic at the time of the alleged attack and it had been “absolute horror”.
In an open letter to Le Figaro in October, Depardieu denied all allegations, saying any encounter with Arnould had been consensual. He said he was the victim of a lynching orchestrated by a “media court”, and wrote: “Never, ever have I abused a woman.”
Another sexual assault complaint was filed last year by Hélène Darras, an actor, who said Depardieu groped and propositioned her during a 2007 film shoot. The case has been dropped for having been past the time limit for bringing charges.
Depardieu, one of France’s best-known actors, has appeared in more than 170 films and gained international fame with English-language roles.
Feminists and politicians on the left reacted angrily in December after the French president, Emmanuel Macron, described Depardieu – who was then under formal investigation for rape and facing fresh scrutiny over sexist comments filmed in a TV documentary – as the target of a “manhunt”.
“You will never see me participate in a manhunt … I hate that type of thing,” Macron told the broadcaster France 5 when asked about the possibility of stripping Depardieu of a state award after the documentary showed footage of sexist and inappropriate behaviour by the actor.
Macron said: “I’m a great admirer of Gérard Depardieu; he’s an immense actor … a genius of his art. He has made France known across the whole world. And, I say this as president and as a citizen, he makes France proud.”
Macron told a press conference the following month that he regretted not having stressed “the importance of the words of women who are victims of this type of violence”.
