2023-10-02 04:06:40
Indicted since 2020 for suspicion of rape and sexual assault on the actress Charlotte Arnould, actor Gérard Depardieu denounces in a column in “Figaro” the “lynching” and the “media court”.
He denies it outright. On the website of Figaro, Gérard Depardieu, indicted for “rape” and “sexual assault”, takes up his pen to respond to the accusations. “Never, ever have I abused a woman,” says the 74-year-old actor, before insisting: “I am neither a rapist nor a predator.”
The actress Charlotte Arnould filed a complaint in 2018 against Gérard Depardieu. The case was first closed by the prosecution in 2019 before being reopened and entrusted to an investigating judge in the summer of 2020. In his letter, the actor does not cite the complainant by name, he speaks of “a woman”, “who came to my house the first time, with light steps, going up of her own free will to my room. […] She came back a second time. There has never been any coercion, violence or protest between us. […] So, I was told, she was under the influence. […] But we are all under the influence.”
The accusations against Gérard Depardieu do not stop there. Last April, thirteen women testified, in Mediapart, of sexist remarks and sexual assaults on the part of the actor, which allegedly took place between 2004 and 2022, notably on set. France Inter published on July 10 the testimony of another young woman who notably accuses the actor of having “showed his penis” before “blocking her against a wall”. And on July 28, public radio had a new testimony accusing the actor of sexual assault during filming. There are therefore sixteen women, in total, who complain about the actor’s behavior.
Concerts disrupted
“I have often done what no one dares to do: test the limits, shake up certainties, habits and, on set between two takes, between two tensions… laugh, make people laugh. Not everyone laughed. If, thinking of living the present intensely, I hurt or shocked anyone, I never thought of doing any harm and I apologize for behaving like a child who wants to entertain the gallery. », explains Gérard Depardieu today.
This defense should be compared to the latest testimony, that of Anne, a technician in her thirties: “He made the set laugh by taking me to task. He started saying “I’m going to take you out to eat, I’m going to get you drunk, we’re going to have a good evening,” always with grunts. He made me the center of attention while I was working, I understood that I was in his line of sight. Until one evening of filming, at night, in front of around twenty witnesses. “I turned my back on Gérard Depardieu to tell the assistant director that I was ready. I felt his big hand, his big hand in my crotch, grab my crotch with will, letting out a big gravelly laugh. I was liquefied, petrified. “That’s the moment he chose to humiliate me.”
Gérard Depardieu justifies his open letter by the disruptions which accompany his Barbara cover concerts. “I’m just a man… but I’m also a woman, who sings and who sings a woman, Barbara. Seeing concert after concert of extremists, without looking, brandishing slanderous signs, defiling, vandalizing, interrupting by screaming the songs of Barbara, this highly feminist woman, is to bury her again. Now I can no longer make his voice heard. In the media court, to the lynching that has been reserved for me, I have only my word to oppose,” he writes. Judicial information is still open.
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