He is often nicknamed the “monster of French cinema”. It could be that this nickname given to Gérard Depardieu takes on a completely different meaning with the multiplication of complaints of sexual violence targeting him. The actress Hélène Darras filed a complaint on September 10 for sexual assault, the Paris prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday, confirming information from France 2. The actress accuses Gérard Depardieu of having groped her during the filming of Disco in 2007.
The prosecution specified that it was currently analyzing the complaint, which a priori concerns prescribed facts, to determine its direction: classification or launch of investigations. Contacted, the lawyer for the French cinema giant, Christian Saint-Palais, was not immediately reachable.
A refusal that “changes nothing”
In an issue of the investigative magazine “Complément d’investigation”, devoted to the actor targeted by multiple accusations of sexual violence and broadcast Thursday evening, Hélène Darras accuses the star of having “groped” her when she had 26 years old and played as an extra in 2007 in the film directed by Fabien Onteniente.
During filming, Gérard Depardieu “passes his hand on my hips, on my buttocks” then “said to me bluntly: ‘Do you want to come up to my dressing room'”. The actress tells him “no”, but “it doesn’t change anything”, she says in “Additional investigation”: “between takes, he will continue to grope me”. In her diary from the time, she confides her distress: “The abysmal void, I no longer exist. Nothingness. The invisible. My heart hurts so much. The worst injury is psychological. No one can give me back my trust, no one can give me back my life, except me.”
Indicted for rape and sexual assault
In addition to this complaint, Gérard Depardieu is the subject of a judicial investigation at the Paris court: he was indicted on December 16, 2020 for rape and sexual assault after another complaint, that of the actress Charlotte Arnould, who had denounced at the end of August 2018 two rapes at the star’s Parisian home. Charlotte Arnould obtained in the summer of 2020 that the investigation, first closed by the Paris prosecutor’s office in June 2019, be entrusted to an investigating judge. Since then, around ten other women have accused Gérard Depardieu of sexual violence in the press.
The actor, who was confronted this summer by Charlotte Arnould before the investigating judge in charge of the case, was also questioned about these new testimonies, according to a source close to the case. On October 1, he denied the accusations, insisting in an open letter published in Le Figaro be “neither a rapist nor a predator”. “Never, ever have I abused a woman,” he wrote, then announcing, through his agent, that he would no longer participate in “any project” in the “context” of these accusations.