French icon Gérard Depardieu convicted of sexual assault, says trial can be ‘special experience’

During closing arguments, prosecutor Laurent Guy emphasised the need to separate Depardieu’s celebrity from the legal process saying, “it’s perfectly possible to be an excellent actor and a great father and still commit a crime. You are not here to pass judgment on French cinema. You are here to judge Gérard Depardieu, just as you would any other citizen.”

Yet Depardieu is hardly just any citizen. As Vulture Magazine notes, he is France’s most recognizable living actor, a cinematic giant whose career spans over 150 films. He has received two César Awards – France’s equivalent of the Oscars – and been knighted with both the Legion of Honor and the National Order of Merit.

Born in 1948 into poverty, with parents that were both illiterate and alcoholics, Depardieu left home at 13, lived with sex workers, and flirted with petty crime. He also once claimed he could drink up to 14 bottles of wine in a single day. In his autobiography, he writes that he worked as a male prostitute and even robbed graves before discovering literature and acting.

In 2011, when British tabloids ridiculed Depardieu for urinating into a bottle during an Air France flight, French audiences shrugged. “Gérard is Gérard,” French critic Agnès Poirier wrote in the Guardian. “Great men (or women) should be allowed their own little quirks from time to time.”

But tolerance has faded as Depardieu’s controversies have escalated. After clashing with the French government over taxes – at one point calling France a “filthy mess” – he moved to Belgium, acquired Russian citizenship in 2013, and became a vocal supporter of Vladimir Putin.

“We could have both become hoodlums,” he said of the Russian President in a letter quoted by France24. “Like with me, nobody would have betted a penny on him when he was 15.” In 2015, Ukraine banned him for five years due to his comments on Crimea.

In 2020, he was indicted for rape, though the charge did not prevent him from presenting a film at Cannes in 2021. The following year, 13 women accused him of sexual misconduct in an exposé published by Mediapart, a leading French investigative outlet.

The tipping point came in 2023 with the broadcast of a documentary on France Télévisions. It featured behind-the-scenes footage of Depardieu making sexually explicit and degrading remarks to a female interpreter. In one clip, he turns to a female interpreter and says, “I weigh 124 kilos. Without an erection. With an erection, I’m 126 kilos.”

The documentary, which drew 2.2 million viewers, also revealed a previously unreported assault complaint.

Despite the allegations, he resumed work earlier this year on a new film directed by Fanny Ardant, where he plays a magician on a remote island. Ardant, who appeared alongside him in Les Volets Verts, defended him in court, saying, “Genius—whatever form it takes—carries within it an element of the extravagant, the untamed, the dangerous. [Depardieu] is the monster and the saint.”

Veteran actor Brigitte Bardot also voiced support for Depardieu in an interview with French television, lamenting that “talented people who touch the buttocks of a girl are consigned to the deepest dungeon.” She added, “Feminism isn’t my thing. Personally, I like men.”

While broadly embraced in Anglo-American contexts, the #MeToo movement has struggled to gain the same traction in France.

Sophie Lainé Diodovic, casting director and leading voice in the feminist organisation 50/50, told Vulture that, “French culture celebrates freedom, transgression in the arts.” That cultural ethos has also allowed controversial figures like Roman Polanski and Woody Allen to continue making and distributing films in the country, long after being shunned elsewhere.

At the close of the trial, Depardieu maintained his innocence lamenting, “My name has been dragged through the mud by lies and insults.”

However, he also alluded to the impact it would have on his art. “A trial can be a very special experience for an actor,” he said, “seeing all this anger, the police, the press. It’s like being in a science fiction film, except it’s not science fiction. It’s life.”

In a characteristically Depardieu move, he also thanked the prosecutors as, “these lessons may be an inspiration for me one day if I get to play a lawyer.”