NOS News•today, 5:38 PM•Amended today, 7:22 PM
French actor Gérard Depardieu (75), who was arrested this morning, was released this evening after hours of interrogation by the police. The immediate reason for his arrest were the statements of two women. They accuse Depardieu of sexual assault during filming. He will appear in court in October this year on one of the charges, the Paris public prosecutor’s office announced this evening.
This concerns a 2021 complaint from a woman who worked as a set designer during the filming of Les volets verts. Depardieu allegedly assaulted her there and said he would stick his “big parasol” in her. She says he then squeezed her so tightly between his legs that a colleague had to intervene.
The other woman, a 24-year-old production assistant at the time, says she was assaulted on the set of Le magicien et les siamois. She previously spoke in interviews about inappropriate comments that Depardieu had made at the time. It is still unclear what will happen to her charges.
At least sixteen complaints
These are not the only complaints against Depardieu: in total, at least sixteen women accuse him of inappropriate behavior. He is accused of making rude comments, assault and also rape.
In 2018, a young actress accused him of rape in his home in Paris. That case came to a dead end due to a lack of evidence, but the judiciary has been re-investigating the allegations since 2020. At the end of last year, Depardieu was again discredited by a documentary by the public broadcaster France 2. It showed images from 2018 in which the actor made comments about women and their genitals.
The actor has always strongly denied the allegations. This is what he wrote last year in a letter to Le Figaro that he has never abused a woman. Last December, a group of sixty prominent figures from the French cultural sector stood up for Depardieu in a letter to the same newspaper. They called the allegations against the star actor a “lynching” and spoke of “an outpouring of hatred, without nuance”.
