Gerard Depardieu gestured at the camera during the 68th annual Cannes International Film Festival in Cannes, France, in 2015. File Photo by David Silpa/UPI | License Photo
A judge has ordered French actor Gerard Depardieu to stand trial for sexual assault of a 22-year-old actor in 2018.
Depardieu, 76, is France’s biggest movie star, having acted in more than 200 movies and TV series. He has been under investigation for this case since 2020. No trial date has been set.
A Paris court in May sentenced him to an 18-month suspended sentence in a separate case. He was convicted of sexually assaulting two women in 2021 on a Paris film set. The allegations against him came from incidents on set for the movie Les Volets Verts. The two women accused Depardieu of groping them.
The alleged victim from 2018 is actor Charlotte Arnould, 29, who said she is relieved that the case is finally going to court seven years later. Her name was initially kept private, but she later went public.
She wrote on social media: “Seven years later, seven years of horror and hell … I think I’m having trouble realising how huge this is. I’m relieved”
Arnould’s father was a longtime friend of Depardieu. She was allegedly assaulted twice in the summer of 2018 at his home. She reported him to the police in August 2018. Arnould was 22, and Depardieu was 70.
Carine Durrieu Diebolt, Arnould’s lawyer, said the judge had ordered a trial at Paris’s criminal court for sexual assault and rape by digital penetration.
Le Monde reported that the prosecutor’s recommendation for a trial had stated that Depardieu “constrained the victim to submit to his will to impose sexual acts on her that she did not have the capacity to oppose.”
Depardieu has denied all allegations against him, saying in a letter to Le Figaro in 2023: “Never, ever, have I abused a woman.”
About Arnould, he said, “There was never any coercion, violence, or protest between us.”
In 2023, French actor Emmanuelle Debever, the first to accuse Depardieu of sexual assault, died by suicide, after jumping into the Seine river in Paris. She was 60. The suicide happened at the time an investigative documentary was released about Depardieu’s accusers, including Debever.
