Gérard Depardieu will stand trial in October for sexual assaults on film set

It is the culmination of a series of complaints lodged in early 2024. After a day in police custody on Monday, April 29, the actor Gérard Depardieu was served with a summons to appear before the criminal court in October. “He will be tried (…) for sexual assaults likely to have been committed in September 2021 to the detriment of two victims, on the set of the film Les Volets Verts [The Green Shutters],” the Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement. A third complaint, concerning events that took place in 2014 on the set of the film Le Magicien et Les Siamois (“The Magician and the Siamese Twins”), is likely to have passed the statute of limitations.

Presumed innocent before the trial, the 75-year-old actor disputes the charges against him. Depardieu’s lawyers, Christian Saint-Palais and Béatrice Geissmann Achille, did not respond to Le Monde‘s requests for comment.

“My clients have confidence in the justice system,” said Carine Durrieu Diebolt, lawyer for two of the three complainants. “If the prosecutor has decided to prosecute Mr. Depardieu, it’s because they believe they have enough evidence.”

“It’s time he stood trial for the sexual violence that has been claimed for years. It’s also time for a law on the ‘sliding statute of limitations’,” she continued. The concept, which exists for underage victims, extends the time limit for prosecuting an old assault if the perpetrator has committed subsequent assaults that have not passed the statute of limitations.

Part 1 of our series Subscribers only Gérard Depardieu: The decline of a sacred monster of French cinema

Testimonies against the actor began back in 2018. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, the “Paye ton tournage” page – which shares anonymous accounts of sexual violence in the film industry on social media – launched a call for testimonies concerning Depardieu, without directly naming the actor, after receiving two alerts about him. That same year, actress Charlotte Arnould, then 23 years old, filed a complaint for rape and sexual assault, leading to the actor’s first indictment in 2020.

‘We’ll meet again, darling!’

But it was only three years later that a series of events precipitated the filing of three new complaints, according to the plaintiffs’ accounts. In April 2023, the website Mediapart published the testimonies of 13 women who accused the septuagenarian of sexual violence. The actor denied any sexual violence in an open letter published in October by Le Figaro. “Never ever have I abused a woman,” he wrote. “Hurting a woman would be like kicking my own mother in the stomach.”

On December 7, 2023, the Complément d’Enquête TV program on France 2 broadcast archives in which Depardieu sexualizes a little girl. This did not prevent 56 leading figures from the world of culture from signing a open letter in support of the actor in Le Figaro at the end of December 2023.

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