Gérard Depardieu will stand trial on Monday for sexually assaulting two women in the first big legal reckoning in France’s version of the MeToo movement.
The 75-year-old actor, a giant of French cinema, is accused of groping, grabbing and harassing the women on the set of Jean Becker’s Les Volet Verts (The Green Shutters) in Paris in 2021.
The trial, which comes five years after an actress first accused Depardieu of rape, is seen as a test of a supposed shift away from France’s tolerance of toxic male behaviour in the entertainment world. “This case will also be a trial of French cinema because it involves the scenes of sexual assault that are apparently ordinary on film sets” the news magazine Marianne said.
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