Gérard Depardieu no longer wants to be silent. In a long open letter, the cult actor of French cinema reacts for the very first time to the various accusations he has been the subject of for more than five years. Accused of rape by an actress in August 2018, the 74-year-old actor was indicted two years later. But a few months ago, Mediapart published a new investigation, in which thirteen additional women accuse him of rape, some of them, sexual assault for others. Accusations that Gérard Depardieu immediately contested through his lawyer, but which he did not want to comment publicly.
It is now done: in an open letter that he entrusted to the Figaro this Sunday, October 1, 2023, the sacred monster of French cinema proclaims his innocence, and calls for respect for the presumption of innocence to which he is entitled. Presumably affected, Gérard Depardieu begins: “I can no longer consent to what I hear and what I read about myself for several months. I thought I didn’t care, but no, actually no”. The rest is more worrying, with the actor not hesitating to affirm that the accusations against him are destroying him: “All of this is getting to me. Worse still, it’s turning me off.”
And to continue: “I finally want to tell you my truth. I have never, ever abused a woman. Hurting a woman would be like kicking my own mother in the womb.” Subsequently referring to the accusations of rape of one of the complainants, the actor denies it outright, and affirms that the latter “came to (him) the first time, with a light step, getting into (his) room of her own free will. bedroom” : “She says today that she was raped there. She came back a second time. There was never any coercion, violence or protest between us. She wanted to sing Barbara’s songs at the Cirque d’Hiver with me. I told him no. She filed a complaint“ he insists.
Extremists ‘bury Barbara again’
Assuring not to be “neither a rapist nor a predator”Gérard Depardieu regrets no longer being legitimate, while the presumption of innocence remains : “If, thinking of living intensely in the present, I hurt or shocked anyone, I never thought of doing any harm, and please forgive me for having behaved like a child wanting to amuse the gallery. But I am neither a rapist, nor a predator. I am just a man, but I am also a woman, who sings, and who sings a woman, Barbara. See concert after concert of extremists, without looking, brandishing slanderous signs, defile, vandalize, interrupt by screaming the songs of Barbara, this highly feminist woman, is to bury her again. Now I can no longer make his voice heard. In the media court, in the lynching that was reserved for me, I only have my word to oppose“ concluded the hero of The goat and D’Asterix and Obelix.