29 April 2024 , 19:33
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Two women say actor assaulted them, one on a film set in 2021 and the other on another shoot in 2014
Gérard Depardieu was summoned by French police on Monday for questioning over fresh allegations of sexual assault, French media have reported.
Depardieu, 75, was being questioned by officers at a police station in the 14th arrondissement of Paris over allegations by two women that he had assaulted them, one on a film set in 2021 and the other on another shoot in 2014.
His lawyer, Christian Saint-Palais, on Monday evening confirmed the questioning was over as he spoke to reporters as he left the station. “The police custody is over. He is no longer held in the police station,” he said.
The first woman, a set designer, said Depardieu assaulted her when she was a member of the crew on the 2022 feature film Les Volets Verts (The Green Shutters). She filed a formal complaint to the police in February.
The 53-year-old woman told the investigative website Mediapart earlier this year that Depardieu first made obscene comments to her, then later assaulted her as she stepped away from the set and into a corridor inside a Paris mansion where the film was being shot.
She said he grabbed her “brutally” and closed his legs around her with a “phenomenal force” so she could not move, then grabbed all parts of her body as he made explicit comments.
She said she felt as if she was in a trap, panicking and struggling to breathe. She said she felt herself pulled backwards and someone else pulling Depardieu, and said his bodyguards had pulled him off her.
The second woman, who was 24 at the time of the alleged assault, filed a police complaint this year alleging Depardieu grabbed her body and made obscene and “inappropriate” remarks when she was working as an assistant on the set of the 2015 film Le Magician et le Siamois (The Magician and the Siamese).
She told the regional newspaper Le Courrier de l’Ouest that he grabbed her body all over.
Police confirmed that the questioning on Monday related to these cases. Depardieu, through his lawyers, has denied all allegations.
In 2020 police placed Depardieu under formal investigation for rape and sexual assault in another case, after the actor Charlotte Arnould alleged he raped her at his Paris home in 2018.
Arnould, who went to the police more than five years ago, accused Depardieu of rape and sexual assault on two occasions at his home in Paris in 2018, when she was 22 and Depardieu, a friend of her father, was 70.
Arnould told a documentary last year that she had been anorexic at the time of the alleged attack and it had been “absolute horror”.
In an open letter to Le Figaro in October, Depardieu denied all allegations, saying any encounter with Arnould had been consensual. He said he was the victim of a lynching orchestrated by a “media court”, and wrote: “Never, ever have I abused a woman.”
Another sexual assault complaint was filed last year by Hélène Darras, an actor, who said Depardieu groped and propositioned her during a 2007 film shoot. The case has been dropped for having been past the time limit for bringing charges.
Depardieu, one of France’s best-known actors, has appeared in more than 170 films and gained international fame with English-language roles.
Feminists and politicians on the left reacted angrily in December after the French president, Emmanuel Macron, described Depardieu – who was then under formal investigation for rape and facing fresh scrutiny over sexist comments filmed in a TV documentary – as the target of a “manhunt”.
“You will never see me participate in a manhunt … I hate that type of thing,” Macron told the broadcaster France 5 when asked about the possibility of stripping Depardieu of a state award after the documentary showed footage of sexist and inappropriate behaviour by the actor.
Macron said: “I’m a great admirer of Gérard Depardieu; he’s an immense actor … a genius of his art. He has made France known across the whole world. And, I say this as president and as a citizen, he makes France proud.”
Macron told a press conference the following month that he regretted not having stressed “the importance of the words of women who are victims of this type of violence”.