Gérard Depardieu was summoned on Monday, April 29, to be placed in police custody in the premises of the Paris judicial police where he is to be heard on accusations of sexual assault, Agence France-Presse learned ( AFP) from a police source, confirming information from BFM-TV.
The 75-year-old actor is to be heard over 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 outrages. 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.
Already indicted for rape and sexual assault
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 facts denounced, filed a complaint on January 9, denouncing “obscene remarks” made by the actor during meetings in his private 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 about “her paws all over [her] body” and the “indecent words” of the actor on the set.
Gérard Depardieu has already been indicted since December 2020 for rape and sexual assault on actress Charlotte Arnould.
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.
