French actor Gérard Depardieu will face a criminal trial in October over the alleged sexual assaults in 2021 of two women on the set of a film. File photo
| Photo Credit: AP

French actor Gérard Depardieu will face a criminal trial in October over the alleged sexual assaults in 2021 of two women on the set of a film, prosecutors announced Monday.

The 75-year-old actor, who previously has denied any wrongdoing, was detained for questioning by police in Paris for several hours earlier Monday.

The Paris public prosecutor’s office said in a statement that the actor has been “summoned to appear before the criminal court” after the questioning.

A trial will start in October “for sexual assaults likely to have been committed in September 2021” against “two victims, on the set of the film ‘The Green Shutters,’ ” the statement said. It did not name the alleged victims.

French newspaper Le Parisien has reported that a 53-year-old movie decorator has alleged that Depardieu grabbed her and kneaded her waist, stomach and breasts during filming for “Les Volets verts,” or “The Green Shutters,” according to the woman’s lawyer, Carine Durrieu Diebolt, when she filed the complaint to the Paris prosecutor’s office in February.

In an open letter last October, Depardieu said: “I have never, ever abused a woman.”

Depardieu has also been accused by more than a dozen other women of harassing, groping or sexually assaulting them. He was handed preliminary rape and sexual assault charges in 2020 following allegations from actor Charlotte Arnould.

Depardieu was long seen as a national icon in France. He has been a global ambassador for French film and enjoyed international fame with several roles in Hollywood.

The latest episode involving Depardieu came as French cinema is roiled by a #metoo awakening following actor Judith Godrèche’s call for France’s film industry to “face the truth” on sexual violence and physical abuse. She made that appeal during a live broadcast in February of the Cesar Awards ceremony, France’s version of the Oscars.

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AP writers Barbara Surk in Nice, France, and John Leicester in Le Pecq, France, contributed.

Paris:

French police on Monday detained screen legend Gerard Depardieu for questioning after two women accused him of sexual assault, a source close to the case said.

The 75-year-old actor, who has made more than 200 films and television series, was charged with rape in 2020 and was forced to put his career on hold last autumn as allegations of sexual harassment and assault mounted against him.

Police were to question Depardieu over two women alleging that he assaulted them — one on a film set in 2021 and the other on a shoot in 2014, a police source said, confirming a report by the BFMTV television channel.

The actor’s lawyers, Christian Saint-Palais and Beatrice Geissmann Achille, did not immediately reply to a request from AFP for comment.

The first woman accuses him of having assaulted her when she was a member of the crew on the 2022 feature film “The Green Shutters”.

The set designer, who filed a formal complaint in February, told investigative website Mediapart that Depardieu grabbed her as she left the set in a private hotel in Paris.

She alleged he groped her “waist and stomach, moving up to (her) breasts” and made obscene comments before his bodyguards removed him.

The woman’s lawyer, Carine Durrieu-Diebolt, declined to provide AFP with further details.

The second woman has alleged Depardieu groped her “all over” and made “inappropriate” remarks while she was an assistant on the set of 2015 film “Le magician et le Siamois” (“The Magician and the Siamese”), she told regional newspaper Le Courrier de l’Ouest.

– Rape charge –

Depardieu already faces a rape charge, as well as claims of assault from more than a dozen women — all of which he has strongly denied.

“Never ever have I abused a woman,” Depardieu wrote in Le Figaro newspaper in October.

Police in 2020 charged Depardieu with rape and sexual assault after actor Charlotte Arnould alleged he raped her in 2018 when she was 22 and anorexic.

Another sexual assault complaint filed last year by actor Helene Darras, who said Depardieu groped and propositioned her during a 2007 film shoot, has been dropped for being past the statute of limitations.

Spanish journalist and author Ruth Baza said in December she had filed a criminal complaint in Spain against Depardieu, alleging he raped her in 1995 in Paris.

Despite the events having passed the statute of limitations, she said she decided to file her complaint in the hope that it would “help other people” to do the same.

Actor Anouk Grinberg, a co-star to Depardieu on “The Green Shutters”, has described how she and others on set were “treated to his salacious nonsense from morning to night”.

“When film producers hire Depardieu on a film, they know they are hiring an aggressor,” she told AFP.

Grinberg said producers of “The Green Shutters” had supposedly appointed someone to deal with harassment issues but that she did nothing.

French cinema has in recent months been rocked by allegations that it has shrugged off sexism and sexual abuse for decades, and criticism that the arts have too long provided cover for abuse.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)