“Gérard, the black eagle is you”, “Victims of Depardieu, we believe you”, “No producer for rapists”… Since the start of Depardieu’s tour sings Barbara, the same slogans return and continue Gérard Depardieu on almost every date. The actor is heckled by feminist demonstrations, which accuse him of paying tribute to the singer, victim of sexual violence, while he is the subject of a complaint for rape. Although he denies having yielded to pressure, the producer of the show has just canceled two dates in La Manche and Savoie.
“For reasons beyond our control, the performances of June 11 at the Carré des docks in Le Havre and June 14 at the Phare de Chambéry are cancelled. We sincerely regret these cancellations,” Becker’s Prod said in a statement. These two dates of a tour started in 2017 would have been canceled due to the too low filling of the rooms. “The pressure from radical feminists and other disruptors has nothing to do with these two cancellations”, justifies himself to the Parisian David Becker, the producer of the show. “We had sold 1,300 places on the two dates. It still lacked a hundred places to be balanced. I preferred to cancel. Only the evening scheduled in Marseille on June 15 is yet to come.
For the first dates scheduled for 2023, several events had already been organized, such as at the Femina Theater in Bordeaux, in front of the Barrière casino in Toulouse or the Sébastopol theater in Lille – the one-hour event delayed the start of the show. At the Lyon Labor Exchange, the demonstrators even interrupted the show for a few moments while at the Palais des Congrès in Tours, on June 10, the actor was welcomed by a vast network of feminist associations accompanied by local politicians from left.
In 2018, actress Charlotte Arnould filed a complaint for two rapes. The complaint was first classified by the Paris prosecutor’s office in 2019 before being entrusted to an investigating judge. The actor was indicted in March 2022. According to the Attorney General of Paris, “serious or concordant indications” justify the maintenance of the indictment of the actor. In April 2023, Mediapart publishes an investigation which reports that thirteen women were victims of sexual violence perpetrated by the actor between 2004 and 2022.
