Content Warning: This article touches on the topic of sexual violence and harassment which may be triggering for some readers.
On March 25, 2025, French actor Gérard Depardieu stood trial. He is charged with sexually assaulting two colleagues in 2021 while filming Les Volets Verts (The Green Shutters).
In October 2024, The Weekly writer William Langley delved into this story and its impact on France and abroad. Read on for his story.
Something is missing from the streets of Paris. Missing from the Métro stations, from the billboards on the boulevards and from the poster-plastered windows of tabacs and cafés. Passing a movie complex on the Champs-Élysées, I realise that what has vanished is the face of Gérard Depardieu.
For half a century, the roistering, Rabelaisian star of French cinema has been an inescapable presence in his homeland. Phenomenally prolific and laden with awards from around the world, Gérard Depardieu has made more than 250 films — playing the lead in virtually all of them — but is now both out of work and out of sight.
The 75-year-old actor will go on trial charged with multiple offences of sexual assault. The main allegations have come from two women who worked on the set of his last film, 2022’s Les Volets Verts (The Green Shutters). However, the climate of accusation goes back many years. As the trial approaches, it is creating an incendiary cultural division in France.
Talk of Depardieu’s wanton (or worse) behaviour around women has circulated for years. But, the rumours have been efficiently smothered by a combination of his star power and the devotion of his admirers.
To the French, he is no ordinary celebrity but Gégé, their beloved bad boy made good. The man who rose from wretched beginnings to become the nation’s biggest star. The friend of presidents and the toast of Paris’ gilded salons.
“You just had to look at him to feel happy,” author and broadcaster Anne-Elisabeth Moutet tells me. “He was this big, lumbering, oafish, bizarrely sexy, dingbat-crazy character who also happened to be a total genius. To us, he’s a kind of living national monument, and the idea of him doing something seriously bad actually hurts us.”
A date with justice
The veneer of invulnerability around Gérard Depardieu began to crack six years ago. Charlotte Arnould, an aspiring young actress, whose parents were longtime friends of the actor, accused him of rape.
A year later, the police dropped what appeared to be a none-too-rigorous investigation citing a “lack of evidence”. And so, Charlotte went public with a TV interview. She described how the star had invited her around to his Paris mansion for an “acting lesson”, then assaulted her.
“I thought he was a friend,” she said. “I’d known him all my life. He’d held me in his arms as a baby. I thought about him as you would think about a granddad. It was completely traumatising. I didn’t know what to do.”
Several other women later came forward saying they too had been victims of the star’s forced attentions. At the latest count, more than 20 separate allegations have been made — some of them dating back decades.
Intense anticipation surrounds Depardieu’s date with justice, but, in a sense, the country itself is on trial. Luxuriating in its reputation for sexual sophistication, and dismissive of what it sees as prudery, France has been reluctant to embrace movements such as #MeToo. And so the nation’s gropers, harassers, and abusers generally get an easy ride.
Many prominent women are now saying that things have to change. At the Cannes Film Festival 2024, a ‘grande remonstrance’, signed by 100 actresses, politicians and leading cultural figures, demanded an end to “the collective denial that gives impunity to the aggressors”. It alleged that 94 per cent of complaints about sexual abuse in France were dismissed without charge in 2022. The signatories called for a complete overhaul of how such cases are handled.
“The reality is that this country is a paradise for sexual predators,” says former minister for gender equality, Marlène Schiappa. “The problem simply isn’t taken seriously — particularly when the men in question are famous or well-connected. We’re still living in the time when women were treated as chattels.”
A nation divided
Yet changing the old ways presents a formidable challenge. The scale of this can be gauged from the powerful support lobby that has formed around Gérard Depardieu. Let’s start with France’s president, Emmanuel Macron. Macron brushed off demands for the actor to be stripped of his Légion d’honneur — the country’s highest civic award — instead praising Depardieu as “a man who makes France proud”.
Macron proclaimed himself “a great admirer” of the star, and called the legal action against him “a manhunt”.
Then there’s the protest letter signed by 56 celebrities including leading actresses Carole Bouquet, Nathalie Baye, Charlotte Rampling, and former model and presidential wife Carla Bruni, which describes the prosecution of Depardieu as “a lynching”.
Published in the daily newspaper Le Figaro, it stated: “Gérard Depardieu is the greatest of actors. One of the last sacred icons of cinema. We cannot remain silent in the face of the attacks against him, the torrent of hatred which is poured upon him without nuance and with contempt for the presumption of innocence. When one goes after Gérard Depardieu in this way, it is art itself that is under attack.”
Bouquet, 66, is a former Bond girl, who co-starred with Depardieu in 1999’s The Bridge. She later lived with him for 10 years and has been particularly vocal in her support.
“All this frenzy has to stop,” she says. “It is killing the man. I have no sympathy for genuine abusers, but that’s not the case here. Gérard can be rude, he has a borderline sense of humour, but he is completely incapable of hurting a woman.”
The country as a whole appears split down the middle. On one side of the divide are those who reject the #MeToo approach as a kind of joyless Puritanism. Singer Arielle Dombasle, wife of the fashionable philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy, has spoken out against “castration-level feminism”. She warned that the onerous rules of sexual engagement seen in the US should have no place in France.
“We all accept that rape is a serious crime and sexual harassment is unacceptable,” says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, “but there’s a view in France that you can’t reduce something as complex as human relationships to a hashtag. Do women really want to be seen as these poor, fragile little creatures who’ll be traumatised for life if a guy makes a pass at them in a bar?”
On the other side of the divide are women like actress and campaigner Judith Godrèche, 52, who alleges that she was raped by two well-known French film directors while a teenager. Addressing a film awards ceremony earlier this year, she called for an end to “decades of silence and denial, and the start of a new era of honesty”.
She claims that Benoît Jacquot, one of the most revered directors in French cinema, groomed her for sex during the making of a film when she was just 14. A year later, she says, another director, Jacques Doillon, forced her to perform dozens of takes of an unscripted sex scene with him. Both men deny the allegations.
“Cinema is made up of our desire for humanity,” Judith told the awards audience. “Why do we allow this art that we love so much to be used as cover for the trafficking of young girls?”
Allegations laid bare
Gérard Depardieu is currently saying nothing. His 18th-century mansion in the chic Saint-Germain quarter of Paris appears to be deserted. The patron at the café opposite says the place is up for sale and that its owner, who was formerly prone to tearing up the neighbourhood on a powerful Italian motorbike, hasn’t been seen for months. His lawyer, Béatrice Geissmann Achille, tells me she has “absolute confidence” in his innocence, but doesn’t wish to add to “what has already been a horrible debasement of the right to a fair trial”.
Gérard Depardieu’s only response to date has been a letter to a Paris newspaper. In which he declared: “I have never, ever abused a woman. It’s true that I’ve often done that which others wouldn’t dare to do: pushed limits, shaken certitudes, upset the regular habits on the set. Usually to get a laugh.
“Not everyone laughed. If, in living the present so intensely, I hurt or shocked someone, whoever it was, it was never my intention to cause hurt, and I beg you to excuse me for behaving like a child who merely wanted to play to the gallery.”
A taste of what to expect from the trial can be gleaned from a French TV documentary based on a lengthy investigation into Depardieu’s behaviour. It features the accounts of 13 women who have worked with him. Their testimonies range from allegations of crude, sexist banter to physical assault.
In one clip, filmed during a visit to North Korea, the actor’s female interpreter relays a question from a fan about how much Depardieu weighs. “I’m 124 kilos without an erection,” he says. “With an erection, 126 kilos.”
Later, during a visit to a riding stable, he offers an innuendo-heavy aside about women supposedly getting sexual pleasure from sitting astride horses.
It gets worse. A young actress, Sarah Brooks, claims that while posing for photos with Gérard Depardieu and the cast of a 2016 Netflix series, Marseille, she suddenly felt his hand inside her shorts. She removed it but says he immediately put it back again. “Then I said, in a loud voice, ‘Gégé just put his hand in my shorts,’ and he just said, ‘Well, I thought you wanted to get on in films,’ and everybody laughed, but I felt awful and completely humiliated.”
Another actress, identified only as Florence, tells the program that before meeting Depardieu on set, she asked her dresser what he was like. “She said: ‘He’s mostly lovely, but, watch out, he has les mains baladeuses (wandering hands)’.” When the star arrived, she says, he commented on her breasts and later tried to put his hand between her legs.
Even Depardieu’s defenders acknowledge that he can be shockingly vulgar, crass and — particularly when he’s been drinking — lacking any kind of behavioural filter. In mitigation, they point to his personal generosity, loyalty, the high intelligence that lurks behind the ruffianly exterior. And particularly the legacy of his extraordinary journey from nowhere to the heights of movie fame.
Hero or villain?
In a sense, Depardieu’s own life has been his greatest heroic role. Born into a poor family in Châteauroux, a dreary town in central France, where his alcoholic father swept floors in a factory, he ran away from home at the age of 12 years old. He was taken in by a pair of kind-hearted sex workers who plied their trade at a US Air Force base outside town.
In his early teens, he went on the road, bumming his way from place to place, hustling, stealing, and sleeping rough. There were nights in jail and fights that left him with the prominent facial souvenirs he still sports today. At 16, he arrived in Paris, “big, ugly, broke, functionally illiterate, but otherwise okay,” as he puts it in his autobiography.
The only person he knew in the capital was a former school friend from Châteauroux, who had recently enrolled at acting school. One day, Gérard tagged along to the classes. Quickly bored by the proceedings, he was snoring in a corner when the director woke him up and asked him to say a few lines on stage. By 18, he was the hottest thing in French cinema.
The extent to which these experiences shaped Depardieu’s character can only be guessed at. He has spoken of witnessing gang rapes and the harsh treatment meted out to women in the rough company he kept. Yet some who know him well speak of an emotional fragility and even a “feminine side” to his nature, supposedly evidenced by his many close friendships with women and his professed love of works by female authors such as Virginia Woolf and Colette.
“I would be nowhere without the women in my life,” he once told me in an interview. “I am still friends with every woman I have ever loved.”
His only marriage, to French actress Élisabeth Guignot — who has also spoken up on his behalf — ended in 2006. For the past several years he has been somewhat mysteriously entangled with Clémentine Igou, a Harvard-educated wine company executive who lives in Italy. As far as I can discover, he is not involved in any current film projects, and the sense in the French film industry is that his long reign is over.
A fateful, potentially final appearance awaits. With it comes the possibility of 15 years in prison.
“We have lived with the myth all our lives,” says his former agent, Jean-Louis Livi. “Now we will discover the real man.”
If you or someone you know has been affected by the issues raised in this article, help is available. Call 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit their website.
This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Pick up the latest issue at your local newsagents or subscribe so you never miss an issue.
