The French film star Gérard Depardieu was sentenced Tuesday by a Paris court for having sexually assaulted two women working on the set of a film in which he played in 2021. He was sentenced to a suspended sentence of 18 months.
The penalty was in accordance with what the prosecutor had asked for after the four -day trial of Mr. Depardieu in March. The actor was sentenced to a list of sex offenders.
The judge also judged that Mr. Depardieu should pay one of the two victims of 15,000 euros, around $ 17,000, in damages and the other € 14,040, which included his medical expenses.
Mr. Depardieu’s lawyer, Jérémie Assous, said his client would appeal the decision.
Women – A sets decorator and assistant director – worked on “Green shutters”, a French film in 2021 with M. Depardieu.
The set of set, now 54, who has only agreed to be publicly identified by his first name, Amélie, testified that Mr. Depardieu seized him by his size and pulled him towards him while he was seated. Then he locked her between her legs and passed her hands over her buttocks, his genitals and her breasts while whispering obscenities, she said.
The assistant director, now 34 years old, testified that the actor had touched her breasts and her buttocks three times when she was walking from her locker room on the Paris plateau. She did not agree to be identified publicly.
The judge called their version of the coherent and consistent events and supported by other evidence.
Mr. Depardieu, 76, denied sexual assault in both cases.
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He said he was not the “vulgar, rude and trashy person who makes people laugh” that he was described as in the media. “I respect people. I like to help people, ”he told court in March.
But he also said that he came from a different generation and that his flamboyant personality, explosive and without excuse was poorly adapted to the current era.
From the start, it was clear that the trial was about two sexual assaults by one of the most famous cinema stars in France. What happened in front of the Court, instead, was part of a long -term care for the country’s obsession for seduction, the non -critical adulation of its artists and the dead point in France of the #MeToo movement.
Mr. Depardieu is considered among the greatest actors of his generation, with more than 230 films, including “Green Card” and “Cyrano de Bergerac”.
He turned to glory after playing in the 1974 film “Les Valseus”, in which he played one of the two small town thugs around France, flying cars and harassing and sexually assaulting women. He said that the film reflected his Hardscrabble education in the center of France as a member of a gang that has stolen cars and smuggling whiskey and cigarettes.
In 1978 and 1991, Mr. Depardieu told two different American journalists he had participated in his first rape at Gang at the age of 9, and “there had been many after that”. Later, he said it was a translation error and part of a campaign of American smear against him. He said that he had never raped anyone but he had talked about his sexual experiences.
In France, he was well known for his personality greater than life, a man who led his car recklessly and arrived on drunk trays. Later, he made its doors with dictators like Fidel Castro and Aleksandr G. Lukashenko from Belarus, and abandoned France for Belgium and Russia to escape a new tax on super rich.
He has been at the center of the debate in France on the #MeToo movement since his arrival in the country in 2017, with accusations of sexual abuse based against him. He vigorously denied the accusations and was publicly defended by many eminent and powerful people in the country.
Mr. Depardieu vigorously denied the accusations and was publicly defended by many eminent and powerful people in the country.
More than 20 women have accused him of sexual abuse, mainly by speaking to French media, in particular the Mediapart survey website. Six of these women filed complaints to the police – two of whom were abandoned because they have exceeded the limitation period.
Among the eminent people who rushed towards the defense of Mr. Depardieu over the years, there is President Emmanuel Macron of France, who condemned what he called a “manhunt” against the actor, who said: “makes France proud”.
This was the first case against Mr. Depardieu to be tried.
Three other women in cinema and television testified as witnesses during the procedure, describing scenes of sexual abuse that they had suffered while working with Mr. Depardieu in the past.
One of them, Lucile Leider, said that the actor had assaulted her several times when she worked as a costume assistant in 2014. She told the courtyard how she added a cape and a hat to her outfit, when she said that she had pulled her behind a curtain, pressed against her and lean on her breasts and her genitals while whispering.
“I remembered having said no with a low voice, but Gérard Depardieu did not know this word,” she told court. “This man is dangerous,” she said. “Everyone around him knows and they do nothing.”
Sitting on a cube stool during the trial, Mr. Depardieu presented a study in confusion and distraction. He mumbled, confusing semi-answers and crushed disjointed ideas in racing sentences. Asked about his health, he spoke of Pope John II and St. Augustin. Asked about women, he spoke of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the hospitals he loved and Victor Hugo.
At one point, he admitted that he did not know what a sexual assault was, saying that it had to be “more serious” than simply getting hands on a woman’s buttocks.
He declared in court that he came from a different generation – a generation that found his funny obscene jokes – and that he would use vulgar language on the set to irritate people and cause a reaction.
He “probably” announced that it was too hot to get an erection on the set, as Amélie had described, he said: “But obscenity was not addressed to him.”
This era, and his time, he said, was over.
“I come from the old world, of course, and I don’t know if this new world interests me,” he said.
He blamed the #MeToo movement to have deprived him of work for three years and said that he was likely to “become terror”. But he also said that he believed that the liberation of the voices of women was a good thing that he “fully accepts”.
Mr. Depardieu’s lawyer, Mr. Assous, has become almost as much a subject of public debate as his client during the trial. The tactics of Mr. Assous’s courtroom and the defense strategy were denounced by more than 180 French lawyers in an opinion article in the newspaper Le Monde as laughing with “sexism and misogyny”.
During a hearing before the trial, Mr. Assous said that the two victims had been motivated by greed. He has also noisily interrupted the tens of times, shouting that the two women’s lawyers were “abject”, “stupid” and “hysterical” and denouncing the trial as “Stalinist”.
He called the two victims of Depardieu, saying that one had never been a “real victim”. “We do not believe you,” he said by finishing a counter-examination.
The court conceded that women had undergone a “secondary victimization” of Mr. Assous’s conduct during the trial, noting that the right to defense had not legitimized “scandalous words and humiliations”. Included in damages, the court granted them € 1,000 for secondary victimization.
