The Paris prosecutor’s office will analyze the program “Complément d’investigation” dedicated to Gérard Depardieu to decide whether acts of sexual harassment can be characterized.
New twist in the Gérard Depardieu affair. According to information from BFM TV revealed this Monday, January 22, the Paris prosecutor’s office will analyze the issue of Supplementary investigation dedicated to the French actor broadcast in December on France 2. In this program, we could see the actor, in travel to North Korea, multiplying sexist, rude, humiliating and inappropriate remarks against several women he encountered, and in particular a young minor girl.
The prosecution, contacted by the lawyer of Charlotte Arnould who filed a complaint against Gérard Depardieu in 2018, will now analyze the content of the television show. The objective: to determine whether acts of sexual harassment can be characterized, and whether the actor can be prosecuted.
At the same time, we learned this Monday from RTL that the complaint for sexual assault, filed by actress Hélène Darras against the actor in September 2023, “will not be the subject of prosecution”. The Paris prosecutor’s office justified its decision by the statute of limitations of the facts denounced, which dated back to 2007. The actress had filed a complaint for sexual assault on the set of the film Disco, in which she was an extra.
In the issue of Complément d’investigation broadcast last December, Hélène Darras intervened to describe what she criticized Gérard Depardieu. Aged 26 at the time, she accused him of looking at her like “a piece of meat”, before having “passed his hand over [her] hips, over [her] buttocks”.
Gérard Depardieu, presumed innocent, is still indicted for rape and sexual assault on actress Charlotte Arnould. The latter filed a complaint for the first time in 2018. The actor has been indicted since 2020 for facts that he denied in an open letter to Le Figaro, on October 1, 2023. He assured that he had “never never abused a woman.”
Furthermore, if 13 women testified in the columns of Médiapart against Gérard Depardieu and some of them were heard by the investigating judge, these testimonies would not have given rise to “new elements” and would not therefore did not lead to new prosecutions, RTL tells us.