"Neither rapist nor predator": indicted, Gérard Depardieu denies

Europe 1 with AFP 10:54 am, 02 October 2023

"Neither rapist nor predator": indicted since 2020 for suspicions of rape and sexual assault on the actress Charlotte Arnould, the actor Gérard Depardieu on Sunday undermined the accusations against him, denouncing a "lynching" orchestrated by the "media court". "I can no longer consent to what I hear, what I have been reading about myself for a few months. I thought I didn't care, but no, actually no. All of this affects me. Worse still, turn me off," the 74-year-old actor wrote in an open letter published in the opinion section of the newspaper Le Figaro.

"Never have I abused a woman"

This lengthy text, which looks like a poem, is the first speech of the monument of French cinema since the publication of new testimonies against it by Mediapart in the spring. "Never have I abused a woman," he wrote.

Without naming her, Gérard Depardieu attacks Charlotte Arnould, the actress who filed a complaint against him for two rapes in 2018. According to him, "a woman came to my house for the first time, with a light step, voluntarily going up to my room. She now says she was raped there." "There has never been coercion, violence or protest between us," he said. And to continue: "If she was under control, it was under her own control, she was never under my control."

"If, thinking I live intensely the present, I hurt, shocked anyone, I never thought of doing harm and I apologize for having behaved like a child who wants to amuse the gallery," he wrote, and to hammer that he is "neither a rapist nor a predator". "In the media court, in the lynching that was reserved for me, I have only my word to oppose," he concludes.

13 women accuse Gérard Depardieu of sexual violence

Gérard Depardieu was indicted on December 16, 2020 for "rape" and "sexual assault" after the complaint of the actress, who had denounced at the end of August 2018 two rapes at the Paris home of the star. She had 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.

In April, Mediapart revealed the testimonies of 13 women accusing Gérard Depardieu of sexual violence. The Paris prosecutor's office had indicated at the time of these revelations to have "not been the recipient to date of any new complaint". The prosecutor's office had also specified that the investigation opened in July 2020 following the complaint of this actress was continuing.