Gérard Depardieu, accused by around ten women of sexual assault and targeted by two complaints of rape, is no longer in France. A week ago, the Complément d’investigation documentary recalled the facts with which he is accused and revealed images of a trip with the writer Yann Moix to North Korea dating from 2018. Gérard Depardieu pours out a flood of words obscene and sexist, going so far as to sexualize a child who goes horse riding. Sequences which outraged both public opinion and members of the government while the program revealed that a second complaint had been filed against the 77-year-old actor. The Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, thus estimated that the actor was “shameful to France”.
On Wednesday, the Belgian media Sudinfo announced that the actor had been living for several weeks in a town in Belgium, not far from the border with France. In Mont-Saint-Aubert exactly, north of Tourcoing.
Information that the media has had confirmed by local authorities. The mayor of the town, Paul-Olivier Delannois, confides that he learned the news “completely by chance”. “For me, he is a citizen like any other, neither more nor less,” he affirms before adding: “I absolutely do not find myself in the comments made in the France 2 program and to other occasions. If there is a complaint, I trust the justice system.”
Gérard Depardieu had already established himself in the town of Nechin, in the same province, around ten years ago, and he received a very warm welcome there. The actor was even elected “honorary citizen”. Alderwoman Marie-Christine Marghem has fond memories of the actor and remembers him as an “extremely correct, very well educated and friendly” man, reports the media 20 Minutes.
Gérard Depardieu was indicted in December 2020 for rape and sexual assault on the actress Charlotte Arnould who denounced two rapes at the actor’s home at the end of August 2018. The case was closed by the prosecution in June 2019, but Charlotte Arnould obtained that the investigation be entrusted to an investigating judge. On September 10, actress Hélène Darras, in turn, filed a complaint against the star whom she accuses of sexual assault during a film shoot in 2007.
Around ten other women, actresses, makeup artists and film technicians have accused him of sexual violence in the press. In the days following the broadcast of the Complément d’investigation program, we also learned of the suicide of the first actress who had accused Depardieu in 2019 on her Facebook account, Emmanuelle Debever.
In an open letter published by Le Figaro in October, Gérard Depardieu assures that he is “neither a rapist nor a predator”. “Never, ever have I abused a woman,” he wrote, “it would be like kicking my own mother in the stomach.”
Several major figures of the 7th art have spoken out on this subject, providing their support for Gérard Depardieu. For Josée Dayan, interviewed in the Complément d’investigation program, it is completely “impossible” that her friend is guilty of rape. Fanny Ardant recalled in an interview with journalist Stéphan Bureau in November: “I knew him privately […] He’s not just a man who came out of nowhere and for whom I would take up the cause […] As soon as I see someone I love deeply attacked, I can’t help but defend them. » As for Nathalie Baye, she said on Monday December 11 at France Inter that she had “never had a problem with him, absolutely never. Gérard has always been a respectful colleague since the beginning of my career.” Although she admits that she does not want to take sides in this matter, she admitted that she does not recognize the man that everyone is talking about: “He is someone who has always been very elegant, very kind, a golden partner to play with. I don’t know this man we’re talking about.”
On the other side of the arena, voices like those of Sophie Marceau and Anouk Grinberg raise their voices. The first showed her anger last summer by describing the actor as a “predator” in the columns of Le Monde. “He never dared to touch me in front of the team, otherwise he would have received my fist in the face,” confided the actress. But with the poor dressers…”. The second testified on Monday December 11 at the microphone of France Inter: “It didn’t surprise me because he’s like that all the time on all the film sets,” admits the Belgian actress. And on all the film sets, people are as indifferent as Yann Moix was.” Anouk Grinberg finds that the show “gives food for thought, not only on the monstrosity that Gérard Depardieu agrees with half of the human race, but the other monstrosity, that of people in the cinema who are indifferent to the evil we do to women, to the humiliations inflicted on them.
To date, Gérard Depardieu’s career is on hold. He made it known, through his agent, that he would no longer participate in “any project” in the “context” of these accusations. In November, the actor was expected at the Les Scènes d’Olivier Marchal theater festival, scheduled in La Teste-de-Buch (Gironde). A few days before the start of the festivities, the actor became unreachable. The participation of the monster of French cinema was then canceled.
