Gérard Depardieu will be tried in October 2024 for sexual assault committed on the set of the film Les Volets vertes, the Paris prosecutor’s office announced on Monday April 29 in the early evening. This announcement comes shortly after the lifting of police custody for several hours in the premises of the Parisian judicial police.
The 75-year-old actor was questioned about accusations made by two women. The first is a decorator who accuses him of having sexually assaulted her during the filming of the film Les Volets vertes in 2021. She filed a complaint in February 2024 for sexual assault, sexual harassment and sexist insults.
The facts denounced date back to September 2021 and allegedly took place in a private hotel in Paris. According to his story to Mediapart, the actor made many serious comments during filming. Then, he would later “grab her brutally” and “knead her waist, stomach, going up to her breasts”. During this filming, “from morning to evening, we were allowed to be salacious,” actress Anouk Grinberg testified in an interview with AFP. “When film producers hire Depardieu on a film, they know they are hiring an aggressor,” she accused.
The second complainant, a former film assistant, accuses Gérard Depardieu of sexual assault in 2014. According to Le Courrier de l’Ouest, this woman, aged 24 at the time of the alleged events, filed a complaint on January 9, denouncing “obscene remarks” made by the actor during meetings in his mansion in Paris. She also accuses him of having made sexual propositions to her during the filming in Maine-et-Loire of the film The Magician and the Siamese. The complainant spoke to the regional newspaper of “his hands all over [his] body” and the “indecent words” of the actor on the set. The actor disputes the accusations, his lawyer said.
Already indicted for rape and sexual assault
Gérard Depardieu has already been indicted since December 2020 for rape and sexual assault on actress Charlotte Arnould. “The investigating judge closed his investigations on April 17, 2024, and transmitted the file to the Paris public prosecutor’s office to collect his requisitions on the follow-up to be considered,” specifies the Paris public prosecutor’s office in its press release Monday evening.
The actress Hélène Darras had also filed a complaint against him for sexual assault during filming in 2007, but it was closed by the Paris prosecutor’s office for prescription. In Spain, Gérard Depardieu is also the target of a complaint from journalist and writer Ruth Baza, who accuses him of having raped her in 1995.
The actor denied the accusations against him in an open letter published in October 2023 in Le Figaro. He denounces a “lynching” orchestrated by the “media court”. “I can no longer consent to what I hear, what I have read about myself for several months. I thought I didn’t care, but no, actually no. This all gets to me. Worse still, turns me off,” he wrote.