A preliminary investigation into rape and sexual assault was opened on July 5 to examine three separate complaints from women involving director Nicolas Bedos, the Paris prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday July 18, confirming information from Mediapart.
According to the investigation site, which collected several testimonies, the prosecution received, at the end of June, the “report of several women”. One of them was heard by the investigators on July 4, a second must be heard on July 21, writes Mediapart again. Solicited through his lawyer, Mr. Bedos declined to comment.
One of the women, a 50-year-old actress and screenwriter, accuses the director of having raped her at the Bedos family home in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine), one night in 1999. Aged 26 years old and a waitress, she had agreed to follow with friends and then with her parents Nicolas Bedos, with whom a “form of friendly relationship” had been established.
A second woman who also had a “long-standing” friendly relationship with Mr. Bedos described to Mediapart a sexual assault committed in August 2017 in a vacation home.
“Accidental gesture”
It was the revelation of the actor’s police custody and the announcement of his trial that decided the two women, who know each other, to testify in court, specifies Mediapart.
The filmmaker, aged 44, must indeed appear in February 2024 before the Paris Criminal Court in another procedure for sexual assault while intoxicated following the complaint of a woman accusing him of having touched his private parts over his pants, in a Parisian club, on the night of June 1 to 2.
“He does not want to question the word of the complainant who describes an inappropriate gesture of a few seconds over her jeans”, explained at the time his lawyer, Julia Minkowski. “But such a gesture, which he does not remember, which would have occurred on the dance floor of a nightclub, could only have been accidental under the influence of intoxication”, had -she adds.
