Indicted since 2020 for suspicion of rape and sexual assault on actress Charlotte Arnould, actor Gérard Depardieu defeated the accusations against him on Sunday, October 1. In an open letter published 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,” the actor wrote.
This is the first time that the French actor has spoken since the publication of new testimonies against him by Mediapart in the spring. “I have never, ever abused a woman,” he says. Monday, Carine Durrieu Diebolt, lawyer for the plaintiff, Charlotte Arnould, reacted to her text on Franceinfo. “I am shocked and scandalized because Mr. Depardieu says he is exposing his truth, but it is certainly not Charlotte [Arnould’s] truth and it will certainly not be the one that will be upheld by the courts,” she said. .
“Mr. Depardieu is not the protector of women that he claims to be when he is accused by fifteen women of sexual violence and he says that he is neither a rapist nor a predator, that will be brought to justice to decide,” insisted the plaintiff’s lawyer.
“Neither a rapist nor a predator”
Without naming her in his text, Gérard Depardieu attacks Charlotte Arnould, the actress who filed a complaint against him for two rapes in 2018. According to him, “a woman came to my house the first time, walking lightly, coming willingly into my room. She says today that she was raped there. “There has never been any coercion, violence or protest between us,” he assures us. And to continue: “If she was under the influence, it was under her own influence, she was never under my influence. »
“If, thinking of living intensely in the present, I hurt or shocked anyone, I never thought of doing any harm and please forgive me for behaving like a child who wants to amuse the gallery”, he writes again, and insists that he is “neither a rapist nor a predator”.
Gérard Depardieu was indicted on December 16, 2020 for “rape” and “sexual assault” following a complaint from the actress, who had denounced, at the end of August 2018, two rapes at the star’s Parisian home . She obtained, in the summer of 2020, that the investigation, first closed by the Paris prosecutor’s office in June 2019, be entrusted to an investigating judge.
In April, Mediapart revealed the testimonies of thirteen women accusing Gérard Depardieu of sexual violence. The Paris prosecutor’s office then announced that it had “not received any new complaints to date”. The prosecution also specified that the investigation opened in July 2020 following this actress’ complaint was continuing.