2024-10-28 18:43:00
Due to the lack of a main actor, the trial of Gérard Depardieu did not take place. The accused, 75 years old, was expected on Monday 28 October before the 10th section of the Paris Criminal Court to be tried for two sexual assaults which, according to the complainants, occurred on the set of the film Green shuttersby Jean Becker, in 2021.
There were, in the front row, the two civil parties, an assistant director and a decorator. Also present in their support were Anouk Grinberg, the film’s actress, and Charlotte Arnould, the first woman to have filed a rape complaint against the actor in 2018 – the Paris prosecutor’s office had requested, in August, his referral to criminal court judgment in this case. In front of the court, around 200 protesters against violence against women had formed a noisy reception committee. Gérard Depardieu didn’t come.
The request for postponement had arrived in court four days earlier, in support of the medical certificates of the cardiologist and the diabetologist. It was a matter of “blood pressure” and of “sciatica”From «Lombard rose» and of «cruralgia»of a “significant risk of hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia”in short, a worsening of his state of health “relating to the approach to the public”unfortunately incompatible with its presence.
Faced with a fait accompli, Carine Durrieu-Diebolt and Claude Vincent, lawyers for the two appellants, took serious note of this last-minute request: “No one has an interest in the hearing taking place without his presence. » Equally soberly, the prosecutor asked that it be rescheduled “in a short time”.
Twenty minutes of monologue
With a little less sobriety, Jérémie Assous, the actor’s lawyer, already certain of obtaining the dismissal he had come to ask for, then launched into what might have resembled his defense if the trial had taken place, ” taking a keen interest in the investigative methods of the prosecution “totally dependent” and to those of Mediapart who revealed the storydeploring the “Excluding 18 defense witnesses” by the investigators and who he intends to take to testify on the witness stand, and sparking murmurs of disapproval in a packed room by evoking the «contradictions» recurring, e “pseudoaggression, hypothetical aggression, alleged aggression” that they would suffer.
“I remind you that you are applying for dismissal”the president of the court reminded him after twenty minutes of monologue. In vain, since the defense on the quality of the proceedings and on the merits lasted another twenty minutes.
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