(Paris) The Paris Court of Appeal, which examined Tuesday morning the dismissal for “rape” pronounced by an investigating judge in favor of Luc Besson, will render its decision on May 24, AFP learned from judicial source.
Posted at 9:52
The investigating chamber was examining the appeal of Dutch-Belgian actress Sand Van Roy against the dismissal order from which the filmmaker and producer benefited in December, whom she has accused of rape since May 2018.
During this hearing, the public prosecutor requested confirmation of the dismissal order, according to a judicial source.
In this emblematic file of the #metoo era, a Parisian investigating judge had pronounced on December 9 the abandonment of the proceedings against the famous director and producer, following the requisitions of the Paris prosecutor’s office.
Luc Besson, 63, rejects the charges against him. He was not indicted, but only placed under the less incriminating status of assisted witness on January 25, 2021, after a long hearing.
“We approach this hearing with serenity” in view of the requisitions of the general prosecutor’s office, had commented before the hearing Mand Thierry Marembert, the filmmaker’s lawyer, with AFP.
The complainant, 34, disputes, for a long time and point by point, the procedure carried out by French justice, which she considers biased and incomplete and which according to her “destroyed” her life.
The case started with the rape complaint filed on May 18, 2018 by the actress against the influential French producer and director after an appointment with him in a Parisian palace.
Two months later, she had denounced other rapes and sexual assaults, committed according to her during two years of a “relationship of professional influence” with the one who is at the origin of the creation of the Cité du Cinéma. in the north of Paris.
The filmmaker and the actress had been confronted once, in December 2018, during the preliminary investigation.
“We could barely ask questions, we could not ask questions about my intimate wounds, and no difficult questions were asked of Mr. Besson”, had criticized Sand Van Roy to AFP.
His complaints had been dismissed in February 2019 by the Paris prosecutor’s office, which considered that it had not been able to “characterize the offense denounced”.
The actress, who appears in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets directed by Luc Besson, then filed a complaint with civil action and obtained that the investigation be entrusted to an investigating judge in October 2019.