Despite the videos and testimonies, Gérard Depardieu persists and contests the investigation targeting him for rape

The investigation continues but still comes up against the desire of actor Gérard Depardieu and his lawyers to question the slightest evidence. The one who was erected in “symbol of impunity”according to Mediapart journalists Pascale Pascariello, Michaël Hajdenberg and Marine Turchi (at the origin of the revelations on this affair), will have to wait until March 6, in order to know if the Paris Court of Appeal accepts his requests.

Gérard Depardieu contested, Thursday January 16, elements of the investigation targeting him for rape. The actor notably requested that his indictment be canceled, as part of the trial for rape and sexual assault on actress Charlotte Arnould (launched in August 2018). At the time of the alleged events, he was 69 years old and she was 19.

“He tried to pull my panties aside and finger me.”

In March 2022, the court of appeal confirmed his indictment. The Depardieu camp then filed two new appeals, studied for nearly four hours by the investigating chamber, Thursday January 16. The actor requested the nullity of a testimony from an extra, collected by Mediapart, then by e-mail by the investigators – the latter lives abroad.

“Without warning, Gérard Depardieu put his hand under my dressshe said. He tried to pull my panties aside and finger me (…) If I hadn’t stopped him, he would have succeeded. » The attack allegedly took place during a scene from the filming of Big Houseproduced by Jean-Emmanuel Godart, in December 2014. Other requests concern a report produced by the investigative program “Complément d’investigation”, the subject of heated controversy in December 2023. The case had taken so long of magnitude that even the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, tried to interfere in the latter, by multiplying conspiratorial and masculinist remarks to defend a so-called “huge actor” victim of a “manhunt”.

In this program, we see Gérard Depardieu, in North Korea as part of a documentary produced by the polemicist Yann Moix, in 2018, multiplying misogynistic remarks and uttering others of a sexual nature when a little girl on horseback goes to the image. “If he ever gallops, she cums”he says in particular, facing the camera. A fraudulent setup for his defense, which went to civil justice. According to sources close to the case, Gérard Depardieu also ordered the magistrate responsible for investigating the rapes of Charlotte Arnould to add to the proceedings or seize these rushes to decide, among other things, on the authenticity of the montage.

Request refused by the judge at the end of July. If she asked France Télévisions, and the production company Hikari, to communicate the rushes, she explained that she could not force them to do so, being only responsible for investigating the accusations of rape. Gérard Depardieu has, once again, appealed.

His defense also considers that the investigating judge demonstrated “bias regarding reporting from North Korea”, notably “in the hearing of different people”. Apart from the deadline of March 6, the actor must also appear at the end of March, for accusations of sexual assault that occurred in September 2021, during the filming of “Green Shutters”. And as with the previous accusations… Gérard Depardieu disputes the facts.