Gérard Depardieu charged with rape

The French actor Gérard Depardieu has been charged with rape and sexual assault, allegedly committed in 2018 against an actor in her 20s.

An initial investigation into the rape accusations against the 72-year old was dropped in 2019 for lack of evidence. It was reopened last summer, leading to criminal charges being filed in December, a judicial source told Agence France-Presse.

The actor accuses Depardieu of having raped and assaulted her at his Parisian home on two separate occasions in August 2018.

Depardieu’s lawyer, Hervé Temime, said his client, who is free but under judicial supervision, “completely rejects the accusations”.

He also said he regretted that the case had been made public.

According to a source close to the case, Depardieu is a friend of the actor’s family.

The woman’s lawyer, Élodie Tuaillon-Hibon, said she hoped her client’s “private sphere will be respected” as the case unfolds.

Besides long being a superstar in his home country, Depardieu is one of France’s best-known actors abroad. He won acclaim in French-language films such as The Last Metro and Jean de Florette, and went on to perform in a range of English-language movies, including the romantic comedy Green Card and a film version of Hamlet.

He is famous for untiringly shooting film after film, clocking up more than 200 cinema or TV movies over more than 50 years.

But over the course of his career he has often been embroiled in scandals that have hit the headlines, and thrown public tantrums. He knocked a paparazzi unconscious in 2005, urinated in the cabin of a Paris-Dublin flight in 2011 and attacked a motorist in central Paris in 2012. The following year he was fined for drink-driving.

“The man is dark but the actor is huge,” the actor Catherine Deneuve, who starred alongside Depardieu in The Last Metro in 1980, said of him.

Depardieu announced in late 2012 that he was “giving his passport back” to protest against French tax rates, went into tax exile in Belgium and became a citizen of Russia which he called “a great democracy”, regularly praising the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

After Paris prosecutors reopened the case brought by the actor, an investigating magistrate questioned Depardieu on 16 December and, finding “serious and corroborated evidence”, brought the charges.

Police also proceeded to a confrontation between Depardieu and his alleged victim, a judicial source said.

Depardieu is the father of four, including the actor Guillaume Depardieu, who died in 2008.

Besides his prolific acting career, he has also been a winemaker, restaurant owner and a singer.

Just over three years since the #MeToo movement broke taboos around rape across the world, France is seeing an outpouring of stories and a wide-ranging debate about sex, power and consent.

Other big names in cinema to be accused of sexual assault or rape include the director Luc Besson, whose films include Nikita and The Fifth Element.

Week after week fresh revelations have targeted the rich and powerful, with one of the country’s best-known television presenters, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, the latest to be accused of rape.

The French political establishment has also been rocked by similar accusations, including against the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin.

A former French government minister, Georges Tron, last week began serving three years in prison after a court found him guilty of raping an employee during “foot massages” in his office and at the home of his co-defendant.