Depardieu to be tried for alleged sexual assault in October

Movie star Gerard Depardieu can be tried in October for alleged sexual assaults towards two girls in 2021, the Paris prosecutor mentioned Monday.

The announcement got here after police questioned the 75-year-old for a lot of the day. His lawyer Christian Saint-Palais instructed reporters that the actor had been launched with out cost.

The public prosecutor mentioned in a press release the actor would face trial over the assaults allegedly dedicated in September 2021 on the set of the movie “The Green Shutters.”

Depardieu has persistently denied any wrongdoing.

Cinema mainstay, no stranger to controversy

Depardieu has confronted a number of sexual misconduct allegations lately and is topic to an ongoing rape investigation the place he proclaims his innocence, with these prices first made in 2020. 

He’s mentioned his therapy in home media lately amounted to a “lynching,” and has additionally discovered some assist for this stance in France. 

Depardieu, 75, is maybe probably the most recognizable male face of his era in French cinema. Some of his most well-known roles embrace enjoying Asterix’s cumbersome sidekick Obelix, “Jean de Florette” in a French cinema basic double header, and Cyrano de Bergerac, a 1991 position for which he was even nominated for the Best Actor Oscar regardless of it being in a language apart from English.

He’s additionally been no stranger to controversy lately. 

Just over a decade in the past, complaining amongst different issues about tax charges for top earners being launched by then-President Francois Hollande, Depardieu obtained Russian citizenship. 

In 2015, his feedback on Russia’s annexation of Crimea led to Ukraine’s authorities blacklisting him. 

And in December, feedback he’d made about girls throughout a 2018 go to to North Korea deemed vulgar by some got here to mild and prompted renewed public scrutiny. 

msh/nm (AFP, AP, dpa, Reuters)