French police have taken actor Gérard Depardieu into custody for questioning on new accusations of sexual assault, the French media reported on Monday.
Multiple media sources, including Agence France-Presse (AFP) and BFM-TV, are reporting that the 75-year-old actor (Cyrano de Bergerac, Green Card) has been accused by two separate women of sexual assault. The alleged incidents reported occurred in 2021 — when Depardieu was shooting French film Les Violets vertes (The Green Shutters) — and in 2014 during the making of TV movie Le Magicien et les Siamois (The Magician and the Siamese).
Another assault case against Depardieu involving allegations of two acts of rape dating back to 2018 brought by actress Charlotte Arnould is still making its way through the French courts. French prosecutors dismissed a different complaint, filed by French actress Hélène Darras, in January, citing the statute of limitations for the alleged crime, which Darras said occurred on the set of Fabien Onteniente’s film Disco in 2007.
Last April, in an in-depth report published by French investigative news website Médiapart, 13 women accused Depardieu of sexually inappropriate behavior. He is also the target of a complaint from Spain, where journalist and writer Ruth Baza has accused him of having raped her in 1995.
The actor has denied all allegations against him, going as far as to publish an open letter in the French newspaper Le Figaro last October denouncing what he termed a “lynching” carried out by a “court of the media.”
Despite the many allegations against him, Depardieu still has his defenders. After a documentary expose on the French star, called The Fall of the Ogre aired on French TV last December, sparking widespread outrage, French President Emmanuel Macron said he was a “big admirer” of the actor and that Depardieu “makes France proud.”
The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to Paris police for confirmation of Depardieu’s arrest and to the actor’s lawyer for comment.
