Gérard Depardieu faces a new judicial setback. The French actor was summoned on Monday to be taken into custody by the Parisian judicial police, where he must give a statement regarding the accusations of sexual assault made against him in recent weeks, as confirmed by police sources to the French media.
The actor, who was already charged with sexual assault and rape in another case, is the subject of two complaints from two women who accuse him of sexual assault.
The first, a decorator who was part of the team of the film Les Volets Verts, by Jean Becker; and who accuses the French actor of having sexually assaulted her and uttered sexist insults in September 2021.
The woman filed her complaint in February of this year with the Parisian judicial police. According to her story, the attack allegedly occurred in a hotel in Paris. The actor allegedly went from making inappropriate comments to “brutal” touching of the “waist, stomach and breasts.”
The other complaint was filed by a former film assistant, who accuses the actor of having sexually assaulted her in 2014. Depardieu has been under investigation since 2020 for two alleged crimes of rape and sexual assault that he allegedly committed against actress Charlotte Arnauld at her home. of Paris in 2018.
At the moment, the actor has been accused of sexual violence by 13 women, during the filming of eleven films released between 2004 and 2022, according to an investigation by the French newspaper Mediapart.
The French actor was once again in the headlines for this issue after the death of fellow actress Emmanuelle Debever last December. Debever was one of the first complainants to accuse him of inappropriate sexual conduct, as reported by the Paris Prosecutor’s Office. In 2019, the actress revealed that Depardieu had “groped” her while they were both acting in the film Danton, in 1982.
Actress Hélène Darras had also filed a complaint against him for sexual assault during filming in 2007. According to Darras, Depardieu smelled of alcohol while they were working and kept looking at her “as if she were a piece of meat,” while roughly grabbing her around the waist, groping her inappropriately.
At that time, Darras did not dare to report, for fear of ending up “on the blacklist at the age of 26”, as he declared on the Complément d’Enquête programme. However, he did give testimony to support Charlotte Arnauld and the complaint she filed against the actor for rape.
The protagonist of Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) has always denied any criminal involvement and behavior. “I want to tell you the truth. I have never, never abused a woman,” he published in an open letter shared with the French newspaper Le Figaro, where he denied being “a predator” and described himself as “a gentleman who loves courtship.” always “opposed to all forms of violence, whether verbal, physical or psychological”, as well as “extremely modest” in sexual matters.