PARIS – The Paris prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday that French actor Gerard Depardieu was charged with rape and sexual assault in December after authorities revived a 2018 investigation that was initially abandoned.
The office told The Associated Press that Depardieu was not detained when he was handed the preliminary charge on December 16.
The prosecutor’s office addressed the charges after the case was leaked to French media.
French media reports said the charges were related to the allegations of an actress in her twenties dating back to 2018. An initial investigation against the star was dropped in 2019 due to a lack of evidence but was later revived.
The French newspaper Le Parisien and the broadcaster BFM TV said the woman claimed that Depardieu assaulted her on 7 August and 13 August 2018 in his house in Paris. The two met when Depardieu led a master class at her school, reports BFM TV.
The unnamed actress first filed a complaint detailing alleged rape and assault in August 2018 in the southern French city of Aix-en-Provence. The investigation was taken over by the Paris investigators, but was soon abandoned.
Hervé Temime, Advardieu’s lawyer, was not immediately available for comment, but he said earlier that the actor “absolutely denies any rape, any sexual assault, any crime.”
Depardieu (72) is one of France’s most famous and controversial stars.
He has appeared in 200 films over six decades and is among a few French actors who made their name in Hollywood. He won a Golden Globe for his performance in ‘Green Card’, a 1990 English-language romantic comedy starring Andie MacDowell.
His first big hit in France was ‘Les Valseuses’ (‘Going Places’), Bertrand Blier’s classic farce about two wandering thugs.
Before crossing the Atlantic to play ‘Green Card’, Depardieu played a variety of roles, ranging from Jean Valjean, the thief-saint in ‘Les Miserables’, to Christopher Columbus.
In 2014, he starred in ‘Welcome to New York’, the film inspired by the life of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former director of the International Monetary Fund who was accused in 2011 of sexually assaulting a hotel maid.