Actor Gérard Depardieu contests elements of the rape investigation against him before the Paris Court of Appeal. The actor was indicted for rape and sexual assault in August 2018 against actress Charlotte Arnould. He was then 69 years old, she 19. Facts that the actor vigorously denies. In March 2022, the court of appeal confirmed his indictment, the cancellation of which he requested.
This time, his defense filed two appeals, examined Thursday afternoon. The first requests the nullity of a testimony from an extra, collected by the investigation site Mediapart then by e-mail by the investigators, the woman living abroad, according to one of the sources close to the case . In December 2014, during a scene from the filming of “Big House”, directed by Jean-Emmanuel Godart, “without warning, Gérard Depardieu put his hand under my dress”, she told Mediapart. “He tried to pull aside my panties and finger me (…). If I had not stopped him, he would have succeeded,” she assured.
Asked by AFP, Charlotte Arnould’s lawyer highlighted the similarity of this scene with her client’s testimony. “His modus operandi is his hand in his pants”, facilitating “surprise rape”, accused Me Carine Durrieu-Diebolt. The actor’s counsel, Jérémie Assous, refused to respond to AFP.
The editing of “Additional investigation” called into question
The second request concerns the rushes of the show “Complément d’investigation”, the subject of a lively controversy in December 2023 which precipitated the fall of the actor. Gérard Depardieu, on a trip to North Korea in 2018, made multiple misogynistic remarks and made others of a sexual nature when a little girl on a horse appeared in the image. “If he ever gallops, she enjoys,” he says in particular. A fraudulent setup for his defense, which went to civil justice. Gérard Depardieu also ordered the magistrate responsible for investigating the rapes of Charlotte Arnould to seize these rushes to decide, among other things, on the authenticity of the montage.
The judge refused at the end of July, according to another source close to the case. If she had asked France TV and the production company Hikari to communicate the rushes, she explained that she could not force them to do so, because she is only responsible for investigating accusations of rape. Gérard Depardieu appealed.
The actor must also appear at the end of March for sexual assault in September 2021 during the filming of “Green Shutters”, which he contests.