MARSEILLE, France (CN) — On Monday, French film star Gérard Depardieu arrived in a Paris court to face two charges of sexually assaulting women while working on the set of “Les Volets Verts” in 2021.
The trial is set to conclude on Tuesday, but might be prolonged depending on the length of proceedings. Depardieu, 76, can only spend six hours per day in the courthouse due to a medical order. The trial was initially scheduled for last October but had been postponed due to the actor’s medical condition.
Two women who worked on set filed complaints that Depardieu groped them. One of the plaintiffs told the French investigative website Mediapart that the actor grabbed her, pinned her by “closing his legs” around her, and proceeded to touch her breasts; by her account, Depardieu said, “We’ll see each other again, my dear,” as his bodyguards dragged him away.
This is the first time that Depardieu will have to answer to roughly 20 accusations of assault over the past few years. In 2018, the actress Charlotte Arnoud told police that Depardieu raped her twice, and this investigation is still ongoing. Around the same time, three more complaints were filed, but two were dropped for exceeding the statute of limitations.
Depardieu has fervently denied all of the charges. Jérémie Assous, his lawyer, said that the claims are “totally false and unrealistic.” If found guilty, the actor could face five years of jail time and a 75,000 euro fine.
Depardieu has starred in over 200 films in a country that puts cinema on a pedestal. Symbolically, this trial could demonstrate that France’s leading men aren’t above the law when it comes to sexual violence.
“In France or elsewhere, for decades and centuries, the great figures of any world, whether it be culture, art, politics, religious, have tended to be protected,” Véronique Le Goaziou, a sociologist and researcher specializing in sexual violence at the Mediterranean Sociology Laboratory, told Courthouse News. “And in a way, history caught up with him — it’s as if he hadn’t understood that the world had changed, that things that someone could afford to do years or decades ago are no longer possible today.”
Le Goaziou points out that many of the famous men accused of sexual assault come from an era when assault wasn’t deemed a serious issue.
“It’s a bit of the same phenomenon every time, especially in the world of cinema, and beyond… it often concerns men over 60, 70, or 80 years old, when you look at the names of those who have been accused by different victims,” she said. “They’re all roughly from the same generation, they all have, especially Depardieu, an important social position — they’re all well-known or renowned in their circles, and they likely evolved in a space that didn’t dare challenge them, make comments or comments about them.”
Depardieu’s trial is the highest-profile #MeToo case in French cinema. It follows multiple cases that have bolstered awareness and activism surrounding sexual violence in the country.
Last fall, Gisèle Pelicot, who was at the center of a mass rape case orchestrated by her husband, waved her anonymity to shed light on assault and became a global feminist icon. Around the same period, film director Nicolas Bedos was convicted of sexually assaulting two women in 2023.
And last month, Christophe Ruggia, a French film director, was found guilty of abusing the actress Adèle Haenel when she was a minor.
“The lesson we can learn from this is that today, all of that is over, it has to be over,” Le Goaziou said. “Men can no longer take the right they took for centuries, considering that they could touch women however they wanted to touch them — it’s over. It’s a bygone era.”