Gerard Depardieu on Feb. 27, 2010.Photo:Pascal Le Segretain/Getty
Pascal Le Segretain/Getty
Gérard Depardieuis facing a new sexual assault allegation.
On Thursday,multipleoutletsreportedthat French actorHélène Darrashas filed a complaint alleging that Depardieu, whom she worked with on the 2008 French movieDisco, sexually assaulted her on the movie’s set.
French broadcaster France 2 first broke the news as it teased an upcoming interview with Darras expected to air on the investigative news seriesComplément d’EnquêteThursday evening.Varietyconfirmed the complaint’s existence with a prosecutor’s office in Paris, which told the outlet it is “investigating the complaint internally for the moment.”
“We’re in the process of analyzing the complaint to see if it should be handled separately or as part of the ongoing case," a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office told the outlet, referencing an ongoing rape case against Depardieu, 74.
The actor wasinitially accused of rape and sexual assaultin 2018 andformally chargedin December 2020.
Gerard Depardieu.ANNE-CHRISTINE POUJOULAT/AFP via Getty
“I was an extra. I hadn’t even finished theatre school," Darras, whom IMDb credits with 12 onscreen roles between 2007 and 2017, said, per The Guardian. “I really wanted to be an actress.”
In October, Depardieu published an open letter in the French outletLe Figaroin which he said he has “never, ever abused a woman” as he acknowledged allegations made against him. “A woman came to my house for the first time, with a light step, going up to my room of her own free will. She says today that she was raped there. She came back a second time,” the French actor wrote in his open letter, perDeadline’s translation of the letter.
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Though Depardieu did not name an individual in that letter, he waspreviously charged with raping a young actressat his Paris home in 2018. Deadline recently identified the alleged victim in that case as Charlotte Arnould. Depardieu denied those charges while speaking with Italian newspaperLa Repubblicain February 2021, stating, “I am innocent and I have nothing to fear,” at the time, per theAFP.“To the media court, to the lynching that has been reserved for me, I have only my word to defend myself,” Depardieu wrote in his October open letter. He wrote that he is “neither a rapist nor a predator," though he indicated he would not work during the ongoing investigation regarding his 2021 charges, per The Guardian.
Gerard Depardieu on Jan. 10, 2017.Foc Kan/WireImage
Foc Kan/WireImage
In April, the French news outletMediapartpublished an investigative report in which 13 other women also accused the actor of separate incidents of sexual harassment or assault. The outlet noted in its report that the complaints came from “actresses, makeup artists and production staff” whom Depardieu worked with on 11 movies made between 2004 and 2022.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go torainn.org.
source: people.com
