Gérard Depardieu is arrested: Why the actor is charged with sexual assault
In the wake of the #MeToo movement breaking out in the last few years globally, discussions about sex, power, and consent have come into limelight. And France joined in the movement as women have started calling out unwanted sexual advances and brought out allegations against big names in the French cinema industry including the legendary French actor, Gérard Depardieu.
On Tuesday, the French actor Gérard Depardieu has been charged with a rape & sexual assault allegedly committed in 2018. The seventy two year old is being investigated over an incident with a female actor in his Paris home circa 2018.
An initial investigation against Gérard Depardieu was held & dropped due to lack of investigation in 2019. According to Agence France-Presse, the same case was reopened last summer and led to the filing of criminal charges against the French actor in December 2020.
While the female actor accused Gérard Depardieu of raping & assaulting her at his Parisian home on two separate occasions in August of 2018, Depardieu’s lawyer conveyed his client’s stance of “completely [rejecting] the accusations”. The French actor’s lawyer also added that his client regretted the case being made public.
Depardieu’s career
Besides being an A-list celebrity actor in his home country, Gérard Depardieu is one of the most well-known French actors abroad. Depardieu’s French-language blockbuster hits such as The Last Metro & Jean de Florette won great acclaim with the audiences.
Later, he went on to perform in a couple of English-language films, including the romcom Green Card, a movie version of Hamlet, and even played the cook in academy-winning Life of Pi. Gérard Depardieu also dabbled in TV acting as he took on key roles in 2020’s Les Misérables and Netflix’s Marseille.
Apart from his enthralling acting, Gérard Depardieu is notorious for his packed schedule – untiringly shooting films without a break and clocking up more than 200 movies or TV shows in the span of over fifty years of his acting career.
Scandals
As impressive as his long list of accolades are, Gérard Depardieu’s career has been tainted by the numerous scandals, resulting in his shows of public indecency & tantrums. As reported by The Guardian, the French actor managed to knock a paparazzi unconscious in 2005, urinated in a Paris-Dublin flight cabin in 2011, and attacked a motorist in central Paris in 2012. And, the following year he was fined for drunk-driving.
In 2012, Gérard Depardieu protested against the French government regarding the tax rates and said he was “giving his passport back”. He followed his declaration by going into a tax exile in Belgium and became a Russian citizen, often praising the “great democracy” of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin.
Catherine Deneuve, who starred alongside Gérard Depardieu in 1980’s The Last Metro, shared, “the man is dark but the actor is huge,” about her co-star.
Charged
Gérard Depardieu is a widower and a father of four, including the late actor Guillaume Depardieu. After finding “serious and corroborated evidence” against the seventy two year old last December during an investigative questioning, the alleged-victim’s prosecutors who reopened the case managed to charge the accused appropriately.
According to an inside source, Depardieu is a friend of the alleged-victim’s family and her lawyer stated her hopes for her client’s “private sphere [to] be respected” as the case unfolds.
Gérard Depardieu, often regarded as the face of French cinema, joins other big names like director Luc Besson, popular French television presenter Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, and interior minister Gérald Darmanin in the allegations of rape & sexual assault.
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According to a judicial source, police have proceeded to a confrontation between Gérard Depardieu and his alleged victim – the results of which we’ll find out soon.
