French actor Depardieu will be tried for sexual assault in October

The 75-year-old star, who has directed more than 200 films and TV series, was accused of rape in 2020 in a separate case and was forced to put his career on hold last fall amid allegations of harassment and assault sexual assaults multiplied against him. .

He denies any wrongdoing.

After police questioned Depardieu on Monday, the Paris prosecutor said Depardieu would be charged for the assaults allegedly committed in September 2021 during the filming of the film “Les Volets vertes.”

“Gérard Depardieu was summoned before the criminal court. He will be tried in October 2024 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'.”, indicates a statement.

Previously, Depardieu was questioned, then released, over allegations by two women that he assaulted them on film sets, one in 2021 and the other in 2014.

The first woman accuses Depardieu of assaulting her while she was part of the crew of the 2022 feature film “Les Volets vertes”.

The set designer, who filed a complaint in February, told the investigative site Mediapart that Depardieu grabbed her as she left the set at a private hotel in Paris.

She alleged he groped her “waist and stomach, going up to (her) breasts” and made lewd comments before his bodyguards took him away.

“It’s a relief,” the woman’s lawyer, Carine Durrieu-Diebolt, told AFP after a trial was announced.

“There are certainly other victims,” ​​she said, adding that up to 25 women have reported “acts ranging from contempt to gender-based violence, harassment and sexual assault. It is time let him be judged.”

Another woman who worked on the set of “Green Shutters” also accused the actor of sexual violence.

A third woman claimed Depardieu groped her “everywhere” and made “inappropriate” remarks to her while she was a 24-year-old assistant on the set of the 2015 film “The Magician and the Siamese.” she declared to the regional newspaper Le Courrier de l’Ouest.

Depardieu will not face charges over those claims because the statute of limitations has expired, his lawyer said.

“If we had had a variable limitation period for adults as we do for minors, these women could have had legal recourse,” said the woman’s lawyer, Me Durrieu-Diebolt.

Depardieu already faces a rape charge, as well as assault allegations from more than a dozen women – all of which he has strongly denied.

“I have never abused a woman,” Depardieu wrote in the newspaper Le Figaro in October.

In 2020, police charged Depardieu with rape and sexual assault after actor Charlotte Arnould alleged he raped her in 2018 when she was 22 and anorexic.

Another sexual assault complaint filed last year by actress Hélène Darras, who said Depardieu groped and made advances toward her during a 2007 shoot, was dropped for missing the deadline for prescription.

Spanish journalist and author Ruth Baza said in December that she had filed a criminal complaint in her home country against Depardieu, alleging that he raped her in 1995 in Paris.

Although the events were past the statute of limitations, she said she decided to file a lawsuit in the hopes that it would “help other people” do the same.

Depardieu had long made headlines for antics such as socializing with Russian and Belarusian leaders, obtaining a Russian passport to protest a planned tax hike in France, and delaying a flight in 2011 after urinating in an overflowing bottle.

But debate over whether his films should be screened intensified late last year after a television report showed the actor repeatedly making lewd comments in the presence of a female interpreter during a trip to North Korea in 2018.

His wax sculpture was hastily removed from the Grévin Museum in Paris and the Quebec region of Canada deprived him of its highest honor.

Actress Anouk Grinberg, Depardieu's co-star in “Les Volets Verts,” described how she and others on set were “treated to his salacious nonsense from morning to night.”

“When producers hire Depardieu on a film, they know they are hiring an attacker,” she told AFP.

French cinema has been rocked in recent months by allegations that it ignored sexism and sexual abuse for decades.

Depardieu's case has revealed a major divide in French cinema and wider society, with some defending his right to the “presumption of innocence” and others supporting his accusers.

President Emmanuel Macron sparked an outcry in December when he defended the “huge actor” as innocent until proven guilty and insinuated he was the victim of a “manhunt.”

Macron later added that he should have stressed the importance of women speaking out.

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