The 75-year-old actor, who has made more than 200 films and TV series, was accused of rape in 2020 and was forced to put his career on hold last fall as allegations of sexual harassment and violence poured in.
Police are to question the 75-year-old actor over two women’s allegations that he harassed them, one on set in 2021 and another in 2014 during another shoot, a police source said, confirming a report by TV channel BFMTV.
The actor’s lawyers, Christian Saint-Palais and Beatrice Geissmann Achille, did not immediately respond to AFP’s request for comment on the situation.
The first woman accuses the actor of assaulting her when she was a member of the filming crew of the feature film “The Green Shutters” (Les volets verts) in 2022. The set designer, who filed a formal complaint in February, told investigative website Mediapart that Depardieu grabbed her as she left the set at a private hotel in Paris.
She said he put his arms around her “waist and stomach, coming up to her breasts” and made obscene remarks before being pulled away by his bodyguards. The woman’s lawyer, Carine Durrieu-Diebolt, declined to provide further details to AFP.
A second woman said Depardieu groped her “all over” and made “inappropriate” comments when she was working as an assistant on the set of the 2015 film Le magician et le Siamois, she told regional newspaper Le Courrier de l’Ouest’. Accused of rape
Mr. Depardieu has already been accused of rape, and more than a dozen women have accused him of violence, but he has vehemently denied all allegations. “I have never wronged a woman,” Depardieu wrote in the newspaper “Le Figaro” in October. In 2020, police charged him with rape and sexual harassment after actress Charlotte Arnould claimed he raped her in 2018 when she was 22 and suffering from anorexia.
Another sexual harassment complaint filed last year by actress Helene Darras, who alleged that Mr. Depardieu groped and harassed her on set in 2007, was dismissed because of the statute of limitations.
Spanish journalist and author Ruth Baza said in December that she had filed a criminal complaint in Spain against Depardieu, alleging that he raped her in Paris in 1995.
Despite the statute of limitations for the events, she said she decided to file the complaint in the hope it would “help other people” do the same. Actress Anouk Grinberg, who starred alongside Mr Depardieu in the film Green Shutters, described how she and others on the set were “forced to listen to his filthy nonsense from morning to night”.
“When movie producers hire Depardieu for a film, they know they’re hiring an aggressor,” she told AFP.
A. Grinberg said that the producers of the movie “Green Shutters” had supposedly appointed someone to deal with harassment issues, but nothing was done. In recent months, French cinema has been rocked by accusations that it has ignored sexism and sexual abuse for decades, and criticism that art has become a cover for violence for too long.
