The #MeToo downfall of Gérard Depardieu, the biggest fish in French cinema, was always going to be messy.
Not only because the actor, in his late Marlon Brando phase, has become a dozen-bottles-of-wine-a-day miscreant who once urinated in the aisle of an airplane when he couldn’t make it to the loo. Even after taking Russian citizenship—downgrading from Brando to Steven Seagal, if you will, in 2013—the highly decorated tax exile has been a fabulous earner, if a declining one of late, for the politically important French film industry.
Still the best-known French actor internationally, and the most talented of his generation, it appears that Depardieu’s rare status in a country with a long history of cultural exceptionalism provided him with immunity for decades of alleged sexual abuse. His long-delayed outing now has split France’s beau monde in two, pitting young culture workers against their elders, and even Emmanuel Macron, self-styled feminist champion, against women in his own political camp.
Despite having twice told journalists that he attended gang rapes growing up rough in Châteauroux, the utterly brazen Depardieu was lionized by his admirers as a magical child, bestial and Rabelaisian, like an artist should be. “C’est Gérard” was about as serious a response as his behavior got, victims later claimed.
That is, until 2020, and again this December, when the fallout started to go nuclear and splattered all over the French cultural and political elite. It turns out that the moviegoing public of 2024 doesn’t care how luminous you may have been for Téchiné and Truffaut if you’re sticking your fat fingers inside sobbing extras while everybody laughs, as Depardieu is alleged to have made practically an on-set routine.
The actor, in his late Marlon Brando phase, has become a dozen-bottles-of-wine-a-day miscreant who once urinated in the aisle of an airplane when he couldn’t make it to the loo.
The first public accusation of rape came in 2018 from a young actress and family friend, Charlotte Arnould. Once Depardieu was formally indicted for it, in 2020 (he maintains his innocence), there came an avalanche of allegations that today range from sexual harassment to sexual assault to another rape, of a Spanish journalist.
Earlier this year, the online investigative journal Mediapart presented the testimony of 13 of his alleged victims, who appeared in 11 of his films. Unable to press charges due to statutes of limitations, they described a workplace atmosphere dictated by the whims of the often drunk, untouchably powerful sex pest. This summer, Le Monde ran a six-part series, “Le Cas Depardieu,” that reported on the actor’s checkered past and cloudy present.
In October, Elle came out with a searing interview with the actor Anouk Grinberg, a co-star of Depardieu’s and the ex of his longtime collaborator Bertrand Blier, in support of Arnould. “I saw him put his hands on women’s asses, touching their breasts and genitals, joking all the while,” she said in Elle. “I heard him talk all day about their pussies and how he wanted to suck them all day, and no one ever said a thing.”
Depardieu was still publicly protesting his innocence when that story came out. That same month, he published an editorial in Le Figaro in which he moaned about media lynching, denied any aggression, and apologized for playing the clown. “All my life I’ve been provocative, over the top, sometimes offensive. I often did what nobody else dared: tested limits, upended convictions and habits and, on set in between takes, in between tensions, laughed and made others laugh. Not everybody laughed.” No, indeed.
Then on December 7 came Complément d’Enquête’s “Gérard Depardieu: The Fall of the Ogre,” a 60 Minutes–style special on the national network France 2. Finally, the country properly exploded. The show included rushes from a never-aired 2018 documentary filmed in North Korea in which a grunting, grabby Depardieu goes on a helter-skelter tour of sexual harassment. No woman, whether it was his Korean translator, a random medical assistant, or a 10-year-old girl on horseback, was spared his greasy elegies to her private parts. “Ah, sa chatte!” (“Oh, her pussy!”), the actor would exult, both to the camera and to whichever woman’s face happened to be in view. The documentary’s director, Yann Moix, stood by unbothered. Apparently, when you’re a star they really do let you do it.
As France tried to re-hinge its collective jaw, by mid-December Depardieu’s cancellation began in earnest. Now, Swiss national television has taken his films off the air, some of them the greats of French cinema. The France television network debated doing so as well before deciding to simply cancel any projects going forward. His wax likeness has been removed from the Musée Grévin (the French equivalent of Madame Tussauds); and the minister of culture openly debated retracting his Légion d’ Honneur.
Depardieu shut down his countrywide cabaret tour, in which he sang the songs of the late singer Barbara, due to the picket lines. (Search “Depardieu Chante Barbara” on YouTube to wallow in the moral ambiguity of a credibly accused predator interpreting the songs of a victim of incest with enough delicacy and sensitivity to make you want to cry.)
The comeuppance of this blighted national treasure was too much for Emmanuel Macron, who gave Depardieu a fabulous Christmas present at a media roundtable on December 20. With bizarrely emphatic delivery, he decried a manhunt that mocked Depardieu’s presumption of innocence and proclaimed that the decrepit id most of the nation just watched shambling through North Korea “made France proud.”
No woman, whether it was his Korean translator, a random medical assistant, or a 10-year-old girl on horseback, was spared his greasy elegies to her private parts.
Not a word for the accusers, who were mostly extras and ingénues and low-status production workers. Macron sniffed that Legion of Honor status isn’t a question of morality, despite the word “honor” sitting right there in the title. (And he said this despite his having stripped Harvey Weinstein of the same prize in 2017, before any verdict was rendered by American courts.)
Prominent feminists took to the airwaves to denounce the hypocrisy of this head of state who had campaigned on women’s rights. Aurélie Filippetti, once Macron’s colleague as minister of culture under François Hollande, published a knockout essay in Le Monde on New Year’s Eve, decrying Macron’s France as “the normalization of inequality” between the all-powerful and “talented” and everybody else.
This steamy climate is just right for the blossoming of an upstart culture warrior named Yannis Ezziadi. On Christmas Day, Le Figaro published an open letter written by the thirtysomething unknown actor, who also contributes profiles and essays to the reactionary, right-wing monthly Causeur.
“When Depardieu is attacked in this way, it’s art that is being attacked,” he wrote. With the help of a crisis-comms expert who has represented such gallants as Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Roman Polanski, Ezziadi’s tribune was co-signed by 56 of Depardieu’s notable friends and colleagues, including Carole Bouquet (also the actor’s ex), Charlotte Rampling, Yvan Attal, Jacques Dutronc, Bertrand Blier, Nathalie Baye, and Fanny Ardant.
With so much buzz and flutter, Ezziadi started getting interviewed, and the minute he opened his mouth, the whole country now watching, it was clear that some of the leading lights of French culture had been taken in by a troll. He screeched on BFM TV of the desperate fear that men such as him have of being accused today as anchors dryly poked holes in his arguments and openly rolled their eyes. So nobody noticed when they signed his letter that the kid was part of the far-right former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour’s entourage? Maybe they could have googled?
“The average age (of the signers) is 69,” noted Emmanuelle Dancourt, president of #MeTooMedia, a victim’s-rights organization, as counter-letters circulated, supported by a younger generation eager to note that abuse and art need not go together, and that what should make France proud is defending the less powerful, not sheltering sacred cows. (Mediapart has run two such open letters, the first signed by 8,000 mostly younger, lesser-known artists, the second with the backing of headline talent like Aïssa Maïga and Laure Calamy. Libération ran one on New Year’s Day signed by, among others, Alexandra Lamy, Muriel Robin, and Waly Dia.)
The young actor Lucie Lucas, who starred in a TV series with Victoria Abril, one of the Depardieu signatories, blew the whistle on Charlotte Arnould’s Instagram: “It’s now 15 years I’ve been an actor that I’ve protected a good part of these degenerate boomers,” she wrote in Arnould’s replies. “Eh Victoria? You want us to talk about your numerous assaults, including sexual ones, of your partners? I’m not surprised you signed that rag.”
Realizing they’d gotten into bed with the burgeoning French manosphere, some signatories to his letter cleared their throats. Carole Bouquet took to Instagram and Nadine Trintignant to the pages of Le Point to say, essentially, No wait, sorry, I don’t support Ezziadi’s entire line.
“I didn’t sign against women,” Yvan Attal pleaded on BFM TV. He’s against media lynching, he said, and he doesn’t agree with everything in the letter to which he attached his name, possibly without reading. The actor Pierre Richard wrote, “I signed without knowing the ideological movement in which the writer of this petition evolved.” But does that change what he was signing for? The hairs are being split so fine they’re disappearing.
As the column inches continue to mount, Depardieu has disappeared into the wounded man cave of his Sixth Arrondissement hôtel particulier. There are no projects in development, but you can still find Cyrano de Bergerac and The Last Metro and even the now very-hard-to-watch brodown Going Places on various streaming platforms. I watched Tous les Matins du Monde last night, and Depardieu is still a peerless actor. Enjoy his work, but do spare a thought for every woman on set as you do. His output came at such a cost.
Alexandra Marshall is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and a contributor to W, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, and Travel + Leisure. She chronicles her recent relocation to Le Perche in the newsletter An American Who Fled Paris