French film star Gérard Depardieu was sentenced on Tuesday by a Paris court for positions of sexual assault of two working on the set of a film in which he starred in 2021. He recovered a suspended signal or 18 months.
The judge also ruled that Mr. Depardieu, now 76, pays damage or 15,000 euros, around $ 17,000, to one of the two victims and € 14,040, including their medical fees, to the other.
Mr. Depardieu was not in court for the ruling. His lawyer, Jérémie Asous, said he would appeal.
The verdict was well received by victims’ lawyers as a historical victory for French women in the #Metoo World post.
“For me, it’s a victory, really,” said one of the two victims, who agreed to be identified only by his first name, Amélie. “We are moving forward.”
His lawyer, Carine Durrieu Diebolt, said she expected the ruling to mean the “end of impunity for artists in the film industry.”
“I heard some actors still supporting Depardieu. Now with this verdict, no one can say that Gérard Depardieu is not a sexual predator, and that is very important,” he said.
The two victims worked on “Les Volets Varts”, a 2021 French film starring Mr. Depardieu – Amélie, as a established decorator, and the other plaintiff, who has not agreed to be publicly identified, as deputy director.
The court heard that Mr. Depardieu grabbed Amélie by the waist and threw it towards him one day on the set while he was sitting. Then he locked between his legs and passed his hands on his buttocks, genitals and breasts as he applauded the obscenities, he testified.
The deputy director, now 34, testified that the actor had touched his breasts and buttocks three times in the set in Paris.
The judge described his version of coherent events, consisting and supported by other evidence. Mr. Depardieu, 76, denied sexual aggressions in both cases.
The actor said he was not the “vulgar, rude person and garbage who mocks people” who had the leg portrayed as in the media. “I respect people. I like to help people,” he told the Court in March.
But he also said that it was of a different generation and that his extravagant, bombastic personality and without apologies was not adequate for the current era.
From the beginning, it was clear that the trial was about more than two sexual assaults of one of the best known film stars in France. What happened in the Court, on the other hand, was part of a very backward recognition of the country’s obsession with seduction, the acritic adulation of its artists and the storage in France of the #MeToo movement.
Mr. Depardieu is considered among the best actors in his generation, starring more than 230 films, including “Green Card” and “Cyrano de Bergerac”.
He went to fame after starring in the 1974 film “Les volleyballs”, in which he played a thug in the small city that hastened France, stealing cars and harassing and assaulting women. He said the film reflected its education in the center of France as a member of a gang that stole cars and smuggled whiskey and cigarettes.
In 1978 and 1991, Mr. Depardieu told two different American journalists who had tasks in his first group rape at 9 years, and “had one leg after that.” Later, he said he had a leg for a translation and part of an American smear campaign against him. He said, he never raped anyone, but he had talked about legs about his sexual experiences.
In France, he was well known for his personality bigger than life, a man who led his engraved car and reached drunk movies. Later, he passed with dictators like Fidel Castro and Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, and abandoned France for Belgium and then to Russia to avoid a tax on the super rich.
He has been in the center of the debate in France on the #MeToo movement since his arrival in the country in 2017, with accusations of sexual abuse accumulating against him. He has denied accusations and leg publicly defended by prominent and powerful people in the country.
More than 20 women have accused him of sexual abuse, mainly when speaking with the French media, particularly the Mediapart research website. Six of these women filed complaints before the police, two of which were withdrawn because they were the statute of limitations.
Among those who have rushed to the defense of Mr. Depardieu throughout the years is President Emmanuel Macron de France, who condemned what he called a “human hunt” against the actor, to whom he said: “makes France feel proud.”
This was the first case against Mr. Depardieu to go to trial.
Three other women in cinema and television testified as witnesses that last the procedures, describing scenes of sexual abuse they had suffered while working with Mr. Depardieu.
One of them, the leader of Lucile, said that the actor assaulted her several times when she worked as a costume assistant in 2014. She told the court how she stopped her behind a curtain, pressed against her and stroked her breasts and genitals.
“I remembered having said not with a low voice, but Gérard Depardieu does not know that word,” he told the Court. “This man is dangerous,” he said. “Everyone around them knows and they do nothing.”
Sitting in a cube -shaped stool that door to trial, Mr. Depardieu presented a study on confusion and distraction. He murmured, confusing through semi answers, and mixed ideas dismantled in current sentences. When asked about women, he raised the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, hospitals that Victor Hugo already loved.
At one point, he admitted that he did not know what a sexual assault was, saying that it must be “more serious” than simply put a hand on a woman’s buttocks.
The “probable” announced that it was too hot to obtain an erection in the set, as Amélie had described, he said, “but obscenity was not addressed to it.”
He told court that he came from a generation of differentiation, one that found his obscene jokes fun, and that would use a vulgar language on the set to irritate people and cause a reaction.
That was, and his time, he said, had ended.
“I come from the old world, of course, and I’m not sure if this new world interests me,” he said.
He said that the #MeToo movement would probably “become a terror” and blamed him for depriving him of work for three years, he thought they have recently seen him filming in Portugal.
Mr. Depardieu’s lawyer, Mr. Asous, became almost both a issue of public debate and his client duration of the trial. The tactics of the court and the defense strategy of Mr. Asous were denounced by more than 180 French lawyers in an opinion article in the newspaper Le Monde as plagued by “sexism and misogyny.”
At a hearing before trial, Mr. Asous said the two victims were led by greed. Hey, also interrupted aloud the doses of the court court, shouting that the plaintiffs “two women lawyers were” abjects “,” stupid “and” hysterical “, and denounced the trial as” Stalinists. “
He called the two liars of the plaintiffs, saying that he never had a “true victim.” “We don’t believe you,” he said when an interrogation ended.
The Court ruled that women had suffered “secondary victimization” of Mr. Asous duration of the trial, noting that the right to defense did not legitimize “scandalous words and humiliation.” Included in damages, the court granted € 1,000 for secondary victimization.
