Gérard Depardieu convicted of sexual assault

French actor Gérard Depardieu at the Berlin Film Festival in 2010 (Wikipedia)

By Catherine Porter and Ségoléne Le Stradic

French movie star Gérard Depardieu was convicted by a Paris court Tuesday on charges of sexually assaulting two women working on the set of a film in which he was starring in 2021. He received a suspended sentence of 18 months, and his name will be added to the national sex offender registry.

The judge also ruled that Depardieu, 76, pay damages of 15,000 euros (about $17,000) to one of the two victims and 14,040 euros, including her medical fees, to the other.

Depardieu was not in court for the ruling. His lawyer, Jérémie Assous, said he would appeal.

The verdict was welcomed by the victims’ lawyers as a landmark win for French women in the post #MeToo world.

“For me, it’s a victory, truly,” said one of the two victims, who has agreed to be identified only by her first name, Amélie. “We are moving forward.”

Her lawyer, Carine Durrieu Diebolt, said she hoped the ruling would mean the “end of impunity for artists in the film industry.”

“I’ve heard some actors recently still supporting Depardieu. Now with this verdict, no one can say Gérard Depardieu is not a sexual predator, and that’s very important,” she said.

The two victims both worked on “Les Volets Verts,” a 2021 French film starring Depardieu — Amélie, as a set decorator, and the other plaintiff, who has not agreed to be identified publicly, as an assistant director.

The court heard that Depardieu grabbed Amélie by the waist and pulled her toward him one day on set while he was sitting down. Then he locked her between his legs and ran his hands over her buttocks, genitals and breasts while muttering obscenities, she testified.

The assistant director, 34, testified that the actor had touched her breasts and buttocks on three occasions on the set in Paris.

The judge called their version of events coherent, consistent and supported by other evidence. Depardieu, 76, denied the sexual assaults in both cases.

The actor said he was not the “vulgar, rude, trashy person who makes fun of people” that he had been portrayed as in the media. “I respect people. I like to help people,” he told the court in March.

But he also said he was from a different generation and that his flamboyant, bombastic and unapologetic personality was ill suited for the current era.

From the beginning, it was clear the trial was about more than two sexual assaults by one of France’s best-known film stars. What happened in the court, instead, was part of a long overdue reckoning about the country’s obsession with seduction, the uncritical adulation of its artists and the stalling in France of the #MeToo movement.

Depardieu is considered among the greatest actors of his generation, starring in more than 230 films, including “Green Card” and “Cyrano de Bergerac.”

He shot to fame after starring in the 1974 film “Les Valseuses,” in which he played a small-town thug who romps around France, stealing cars, and sexually harassing and assaulting women. He said the film reflected his hardscrabble upbringing in central France as a member of a gang that stole cars and smuggled whiskey and cigarettes.

In 1978 and 1991, Depardieu told two different American journalists that he had taken part in his first gang rape at age 9, and “there had been many after that.” Later, he said it had been a translation error and part of an American smear campaign against him. He said he had never raped anyone but had been talking about his sexual experiences.

In France, he was well known for his larger-than-life personality, a man who drove his car recklessly and arrived on film sets drunk. Later, he hobnobbed with dictators like Fidel Castro and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, and abandoned France for Belgium and then Russia to avoid a tax on the super rich.

He has been at the center of the debate in France over the #MeToo movement since its arrival in the country in 2017, with accusations of sexual abuse piling up against him. He has denied the accusations and been publicly defended by prominent and powerful people in the country.

More than 20 women have accused him of sexual abuse, mostly by speaking to French news outlets, particularly the investigation website Mediapart. Six of those women filed complaints with the police — two of which were dropped because they were past the statute of limitations.

Among those who have rushed to Depardieu’s defense over the years is President Emmanuel Macron of France, who condemned what he called a “manhunt” against the actor, whom he said, “makes France proud.”

This was the first case against Depardieu to go to trial.

Three other women in film and television testified as witnesses during the proceedings, describing scenes of sexual abuse they had suffered while working with Depardieu.

One of them, Lucile Leider, said the actor assaulted her multiple times when she worked as a costume assistant in 2014. She recounted to the court how he pulled her behind a curtain, pressed himself against her and stroked her breasts and genitals while whispering obscenities.

“I remembered saying no with a low voice, but Gérard Depardieu does not know that word,” she told the court. “This man is dangerous,” she said. “Everyone around him knows it and they don’t do anything.”

Sitting on a cube-like stool during the trial, Depardieu presented a study in confusion and distraction. He mumbled, muddling through semi-responses, and mashed disjointed ideas into run-on sentences. Asked about women, he brought up the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, hospitals he loved and Victor Hugo.

At one point, he admitted he did not know what a sexual assault was, saying it must be “more serious” than just putting a hand on a woman’s buttocks.

He “probably” announced it was too hot to get an erection on set, as Amélie had described, he said, “but the obscenity was not addressed to her.”

He told the court he came from a different generation — one that found his obscene jokes funny — and that he would use vulgar language on set to irritate people and provoke a reaction.

That era, and his time, he said, was finished.

“I come from the old world, of course, and am not sure if this new world interests me,” he said.

He said the #MeToo movement was likely to “become a terror” and blamed it for depriving him of work for three years, though he has been recently seen filming in Portugal.

Assous, Depardieu’s lawyer, became almost as much a subject of public debate as his client during the trial. Assous’ courtroom tactics and defense strategy were denounced by more than 180 French lawyers in an opinion piece in the newspaper Le Monde as rife with “sexism and misogyny.”

At a hearing before the trial, Assous said the two victims were driven by greed. He also loudly interrupted the court dozens of times, shouting that the plaintiffs’ two female lawyers were “abject,” “stupid” and “hysterical,” and denouncing the trial as “Stalinist.”

He called both of the plaintiffs liars, saying one had never been a “real victim.” “We don’t believe you,” he said as he ended one cross-examination.

The court ruled that the women had suffered “secondary victimization” from Assous’ conduct during the trial, noting that the right to defense did not legitimize “outrageous words and humiliation.” Included in the damages the court awarded them was 1,000 euros for secondary victimization.