Controversy in France over Macron’s defense of Depardieu despite rape allegations

France is immersed this Thursday in the controversy over the defense that President Emmanuel Macron made last night of the actor Gérard Depardieu, accused of rape and sexual assault by several women.

Last night Macron declared himself a “great admirer” of the actor and ruled out the possibility of withdrawing the Legion of Honor, as the Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, had suggested last week, as long as there is no judicial conviction.
That decoration “is not for morale,” the president pointed out.

Depardieu faces three rape complaints (two by French actresses and the last one filed this week by a Spanish journalist), and in 2020 he was formally accused by a court in one of those cases. In addition, another dozen women have pointed out him publicly but without denouncing him.

In addition, a television program broadcast in France at the beginning of this month caused a stir due to a series of misogynistic, sexist and insulting phrases towards women uttered by the actor during the recording of a documentary in 2018.

“There is one thing in which you will never see me, and that is in manhunts. I hate him,” Macron said in an interview Wednesday night on public television network France 5, in which he said that Depardieu “makes France proud.”

Storm of criticism

These words have generated a storm of criticism, starting with Macron’s predecessor in the Elysée, former socialist president François Hollande, stating today that “we are not proud of Gérard Depardieu.”

In a statement to public radio France Inter, Hollande regretted that Macron did not talk about “the assaulted and humiliated women.” “The president was expected to talk about women and not simply say that Gérard Depardieu is a great actor.”

He also recalled that Macron had made the cause of women one of the great issues of his second term “and we already see how he deals with the issue of Gérard Depardieu.”

The president of the Women’s Foundation, Anne-Cécile Mailfert, considered on Hasn’t he always defended the powerful?

Macron’s phrases “are once again an insult to the movement for the liberation of the speech of victims of sexual violence,” stressed environmentalist environmentalist deputy Sandrine Rousseau.

“I have felt nausea. I am not proud, far from it,” Juliette Méadel, Secretary of State for Victim Assistance in 2016-17 with President François Hollande, also confessed in X.

On the other hand, Macronist deputy Maud Bregeon pointed out today on the BFM channel that Macron “defended the rule of law and the presumption of innocence,” leaving aside the level of the interpreter’s comments.

The Minister of Culture has not yet commented on the president’s comments, but last week, when she announced that she would launch a “disciplinary procedure” on the possibility of withdrawing the Legion of Honor from the actor, she described his actions as “attitudes and words of intolerable violence, brutality and indignity.”

The next day, Depardieu, through his lawyers, put his Legion of Honor at the minister’s disposal and declared himself the victim of “a media lynching.”

The Grevin Museum removed the figure of Depardieu

This week, the Grevin Museum, the famous gallery of wax figures in central Paris, removed the Depardieu figure due to negative reactions from visitors and on social networks.

On the other hand, the authorities are investigating the circumstances of the death of actress Emmanuelle Debever, who in 2019 reported “inappropriate behavior” by Depardieu during a filming.

The interpreter died on December 7 in Paris after jumping from one of the bridges over the Seine.

In recent weeks, the Canadian province of Quebec has withdrawn its highest distinction, and the small Belgian town of Nochin, where he lived for several years – according to his critics to pay less taxes than in France – last Saturday withdrew the medal of honorary citizen

The actor currently lives in another small Belgian town next to the French border, Mont-Saint-Aubert, where he would have taken refuge, renting a friend’s house, to escape the media storm that surrounds him, according to several French media. With EFE

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