Gerard Depardieu’s sex assault convictions deliver a shameful reckoning for all France: JANE FRYER

Yesterday, in a Paris courtroom, Gerard Depardieu, the 76-year-old French one-time sex symbol, hell-raiser, star of more than 200 films including Jean de Florette, Cyrano de Bergerac and Green Card, was found guilty of sexually assaulting two women – a 34-year-old assistant director and a 54-year-old set dresser.

The court heard how, during the shooting of Les Volets Verts (The Green Shutters) in Paris in September 2021, Depardieu trapped the set designer, known as Amelie, when she was making calls to track down parasols for the film.

How he grabbed her hard between his legs, groped her buttocks, pubis and chest with great force, and allegedly said, ‘Come and touch my big parasol. I’ll stick it in your p****,’ until he had to be pulled off of her.

‘That’s where I understood the strength he had, he held me very, very hard,’ said Amelie. ‘I remember his eyes, I saw this big face, red eyes, very angry, very agitated… with a crazy look. I’ve never seen anything like that.’

And how, according to the assistant director who was not named in the media, he ‘talked about sex all day on set, constantly talking of ‘p****’ to everyone’ and attacked her in a similarly opportunistic and savage manner.

He was given an 18-month suspended prison sentence, fined 31,540 euros and will have his name added to France’s sex offender register. He also faces allegations of sexual harassment and assault from at least a dozen other women, along with a claim by actress Charlotte Arnould of rape on a set in 2018, when she was just 22.

But Depardieu didn’t bother turning up for the verdict yesterday and no one seemed to know where he was.

Perhaps he was back on set for his latest film which, astonishingly, he is making with his old friend, the actress Fanny Ardant, who testified in support of him. Or maybe he is drowning his sorrows. Or, who knows, perhaps he is just marvelling at how he got away with it all for so long.

Gerard Depardieu (pictured) was found guilty of sexually assaulting two women

Plaintiff Amelie K reacts as she speaks to members of the media at the courthouse, as the court convicted French actor Gerard Depardieu of sexual assault of two women

Because, for half a century, however badly he’s behaved, nobody in France seems to have cared, festooning him with awards, making him a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur, presenting him with the Ordre National du Merite and celebrating him as a national icon.

They’ve lapped up stories in his autobiography of robbery, prostitution and extreme random violence when he was a teenager.

And indulged his love of extreme boozing – he claims to regularly drink up to 14 bottles of wine a day, limbering up with red or champagne before 10am, two carafes at lunch; champagne, beer and pastis in the afternoon, and vodka and whisky in the evening.

And when, in 2011, he urinated into a bottle on a flight, which he then spilled, mention was made of his ‘louche charisma’.

The French film industry didn’t even seem to get very wound up about ongoing allegations of tax fraud against him. Or care about his dodgy friendships – with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, with whom he went hunting. Or Vladimir Putin, whom he describes as ‘the man Russia needs’ – which perhaps has something to do with Putin granting him Russian citizenship in 2013.

And astonishingly, despite a slew of complaints about his sexually aggressive behaviour on set and off, until recently, nothing really stuck.

Indeed in December 2023, when a documentary aired showing him making sexually suggestive comments about a young girl in North Korea, he dismissed it as a ‘manhunt’.

President Emmanuel Macron even defended him on national television, saying: ‘Gerard Depardieu makes France proud.’ (Though Mr Macron did rethink his approach weeks later to confirm it was ‘important for women who are victims of abuse to speak out’.)

The actor, 76, has been convicted of having groped a 54-year-old set dresser and a 34-year-old assistant during the filming of ‘Les Volets Verts’. Pictured: Depardieu appears at a Paris courthouse, March 27, 2025

Depardieu’s lawyer Jeremie Assous arrives at the courthouse, in Paris, Tuesday, May 13, 2025

Two woman – a 54-year-old set dresser and a 34-year-old assistant director – claimed that Depardieu subjected them to sexual violence on set

French President Emmanuel Macron came under fire in 2023 after he praised Depardieu as a great actor and described him as the target of a ‘manhunt’

Then again, the French have never seemed keen to embrace the #MeToo movement, confront sexual violence or hold influential men accountable.

Just last month, a damning parliamentary report concluded that sexual violence and sexual harassment remained ‘endemic’ in France’s entertainment industry and that women and children were still routinely preyed on.

They’ve got a point. Back in 2018, actress Catherine Deneuve, now 81, signed a letter along with 100 other women that defended men’s ‘freedom to bother’ women as essential to that oh-so-French ritual of seduction.

And on the eve of the trial, 90-year-old Brigitte Bardot defended ‘talented people who grab a girl’s bottom’. Of course, whatever Brigitte says, a quick ‘grab’ is never okay. But, says set designer Amelie, this was never about the grab, but the ‘savagery’.

‘That fear that I felt – what stands out for me is not his sexual desire but his savagery.

‘It was the fact that he knew I was afraid – I saw his eyes light up with a kind of pleasure in making someone afraid. I remember that savagery.’

For all his gallic charm, it seems that Depardieu has always struggled with an unhappy blurring between right and wrong.

Most likely due to his grindingly poor upbringing in Chateauroux, 200 miles south of Paris, where his mother told him how she’d tried to abort him with a knitting needle. His parents couldn’t afford a midwife so he delivered his younger siblings, and they were so poor they ate hedgehogs and bought meat only once a month.

‘I did not change one iota from how I was when I was about 12,’ he once said.

Which is rather telling because, by his own account, aged 12 he was wandering the streets stealing, fighting, prostituting himself and beating people up.

It was only after spending three months in prison for stealing a car aged 16 that a psychologist told him he should be on the stage.

And then one day, as if by magic, he got chatting in a bar with the niece of French filmmaker Roger Leenhardt, who recommended him for a small part as a beatnik in one of her uncle’s movies.

It was in 1974 that he won his breakthrough role, playing a petty thief in the sexually explicit film Les Valseuses and scaring the crew half to death.

‘We literally had to follow him at night to stop him getting into punch-ups,’ director Bertrand Blier once said.

Depardieu has been accused of improper behaviour by around 20 women, but this was the first case to reach trial

Activists hold placards as they demonstrate outside the Paris courthouse on the opening day of French actor Gerard Depardieu’s trial

Prominent French actress Anouk Grinberg has publicly supported the accusers

Set designer Amelie (pictured) told the court that Depardieu had trapped her between his legs as she tried to pass him in a corridor before he began touching her body

But he really could act, so his career rocketed. By the 1980s, he was the most sought-after French actor: talented, sexy, internationally famous and astonishingly versatile, playing everything from Joseph Stalin to Auguste Rodin, Cyrano de Bergerac to the Count of Monte Cristo. He even rubbed shoulders with Princess Diana and the Pope.

The real shame, of course, is that neither his astonishing success nor the massive riches that came with it made him any nicer.

He drank and drank – once so inebriated that he downed a bottle of hair lotion, thinking it was a specialist Italian liqueur – and ate to excess. Several chickens and four steaks at a single sitting. Often five meals a day.

Meanwhile, he remained as angry and aggressive as his 12-year-old self – headbutting photographers and punching a motorist after his scooter collided with the man’s car.

And through serial infidelities, he wrecked his relationship with Elisabeth Guignot, his wife and co-star in Jean de Florette, and there were endless dramas with partners including French-Senegalese model Karine Silla and James Bond actress Carole Bouquet. But on and on he worked. Often at a rate of four films a year.

Until, over the last couple of years, the allegations of sexual misconduct started piling up so fast – more than 20 women have now publicly accused him of improper behaviour – that even French film-makers have stopped casting him.

And prosecutors are now calling for him to be tried for the alleged rape of Charlotte Arnould.

Depardieu, of course, denies all allegations. ‘Never, but never, have I abused a woman,’ he wrote in an open letter in the French newspaper Le Figaro in 2023.

‘I have only ever been guilty of being too loving, too generous, or having a temperament that is too strong,’ he insisted.

Try telling that to poor Amelie.

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