Gérard Depardieu’s conviction was a historic moment for #MeToo in France by Angelique Chrisafis in Paris, May 17, 2025, The Guardian
The age of impunity is over for male violence against women, say campaigners after the actor was found guilty of sexual assault
When Gérard Depardieu, one of France’s biggest cinema stars, was placed on the sex offender register this week after being found guilty of sexually assaulting two women on a film set in 2021, it was a historic moment for the #MeToo movement in the country.
“It was a message to all men in power that they are answerable to the courts and can be convicted,” said Catherine Le Magueresse, who represented the European Association Against Violence Towards Women at Work (AVFT) at the trial. “The message is: watch out, the impunity is over.”
Depardieu, 76, who has made more than 200 films and TV series, had for years personified one of the key obstacles to the French #MeToo movement: France’s cult of the creative genius. Depardieu’s acting talent and international fame was seen as so great that he was untouchable. French cinema and politics had been slow – even reluctant – to take abuse claims seriously.
“This is the first time such a strong signal has been given that no one is above the law for violence against women – that message has been lacking until now,” said the Green MP Sandrine Rousseau who co-authored a recent parliamentary report that found sexual violence was “endemic” in the French entertainment industry. More now needs to be done, she argued.
The judge convicted Depardieu of sexually assaulting the two women on the set of the film, Les Volets Verts (The Green Shutters), noting that the actor seemed “not to have understood the notion of consent nor the injurious consequences of his actions”. Depardieu had trapped, grabbed and touched the women, shouting obscenities and calling one a “snitch” for speaking out.
The priority now was to clean up sexism within the legal system itself, feminists said. Depardieu’s trial showed that French courts can be brutal for sexual violence survivors. This had been clear at the trial last year of 51 men over the rape of Gisèle Pelicot, who had been drugged unconscious by her husband. Pelicot said she was “humiliated” by defence lawyers, who asked if the men might have thought she was drunk or pretending to be asleep. Her lawyer, Antoine Camus, criticised how, in French courts, “there is still discussion of whether you’re a ‘good’ victim”.
In the Depardieu trial, the judge went further. Setting a legal precedent, he ruled that Depardieu’s defence lawyer, Jérémie Assous, had been so “excessively harsh” to the two women in court that they must be compensated for “secondary victimisation”. One woman, Amélie, a set decorator, said her experience of being questioned by Depardieu’s defence had been “hell”. Assous had told the women they were liars and not real victims. He called the women’s lawyers hysterical, “abject and stupid”.
This fucker needs to be disbarred, like the abusive Canadian hockey player lawyers
Céline Piques of the feminist group Osez Le Féminisme said the ruling on the treatment of the Depardieu complainants in court could be a turning point in France. “Depardieu’s defence was absolutely shocking, with multiple excesses and sexist attacks. When women file a legal complaint they are mistreated at every step, from the investigation to the trial, where they are attacked with sexist archetypes and lawyers try to destabilise them with tactics outside the legal sphere. In Depardieu’s trial, there was at least recognition that this is not acceptable.”
Depardieu’s behaviour was well-known for years, witnesses told the court. Yet the actor had been defended at the highest level of French culture and politics. In 2023, 50 film and cultural figures, including the actor Charlotte Rampling and singer Carla Bruni, signed a petition entitled “Don’t Cancel Gérard Depardieu”.
Depardieu’s greatest defender was the French president. Emmanuel Macron – elected in 2017 just as the #MeToo movement went global after revelations against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein – had vowed to combat violence against women and girls. But in 2023, when Depardieu was under formal investigation for rape in another case and also facing scrutiny over sexist comments revealed in a TV documentary, Macron defended him, saying “he makes France proud”. Asked at the time about stripping Depardieu of a state award, Macron suggested Depardieu was the target of a “manhunt”. Macron has yet to comment on Depardieu’s conviction.
Aurore Bergé, the French equality minister, said after the verdict: “No talent, however great, has the right to immunity.”
Depardieu, who denied the charges and will appeal his conviction, was given an 18-month suspended prison sentence.That’s a kiss for the lout Earlier this year, the film director Christophe Ruggia, who was found guilty of sexually assaulting the actor Adèle Haenel in the early 2000s when she was aged between 12 and 15, was given a four-year sentence with two years suspended and two to be served with an electronic bracelet.Globally, judges handle sexual monster men with special love tenderness and care. Disgusting. I blame rape religions, the popes and their crazed misogynistic cruelty, and humanity’s propaganda book, the bible and other religious texts.
Cases in France can be slow to come to court. The Paris prosecutor’s office has requested that Depardieu face a further trial for rape and sexual assault in a separate case brought by the actor Charlotte Arnould, but no date has been set. Depardieu has denied those allegations.I believe the victims, not the rapists or their lawyers, and think judges that give special favours to rapists while further harming victims are detestable and must be fired. The French TV presenter and newsreader Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, known as PPDA, has been placed under formal investigation for alleged rape, after many women came forward in what is seen as one of the biggest #MeToo cases in France. But the case is taking a long time. He denies the allegations.
Emmanuelle Dancourt, the president of the association MeTooMedia, is among the women who filed complaints against d’Arvor.
She attended Depardieu’s trial and said there should be a “complete overhaul” of the French legal system, with specialist courts on sexist and sexual violence.Canada needs this too.
Dancourt said that although show business was important, #MeToo groups in France were joining forces across all sectors and social strata, including industry and lower-income jobs, so action didn’t focus only on a “#MeToo of the 1%”.
She said women who speak out in France, including Depardieu’s two victims, still see an impact on their careers. “France cannot keep lagging behind culturally and politically on this,” Dancourt said. “It can’t be one step forward, two steps back.”
***
@amirattaran.bsky.social:
This has to be one of the most troubling stories of lawyer ethics I’ve ever read. I cannot imagine recommending Henein Hutchison Robitaille LLP to anyone, ever, for anything.
Why didn’t police lay charges in 2019? Inside the London police investigations in the Hockey Canada sex assault case, London police documents make clear the high-profile sex assault investigation was reopened in 2022 due to “a resurgence in media attention” — with the key evidence largely unchanged from 2019 by Jacques Gallant, Courts and Justice Reporter, May 17, 2025, Toronto Star
The call came in to London, Ont., police on June 19, 2018, from a woman saying she needed advice.
“So my daughter was out at a bar last night, she came home this morning … and I can’t really get a whole lot of information out of her. She’s basically saying she’s embarrassed, she’s ashamed, she put herself in a bad situation,” the woman said.
“I have reason to believe obviously something happened that she didn’t agree to. I don’t really know where to go from there.”
That same day, another call came to police, this time from Glen McCurdie, a vice-president at Hockey Canada. A man had called the organization reporting his partner’s daughter may have been sexually assaulted in a hotel room with players, McCurdie told police, and the young woman didn’t want to come forward.
“All I’m telling you is the allegations that came through the mother’s boyfriend,” McCurdie said. “That’s all I’ve got.”
Those first phone calls would soon lead to an eight-month police investigation into an alleged sexual assault committed at the Delta Armouries hotel in London by members of the 2018 Canadian world junior team, following the Hockey Canada Foundation’s annual Gala & Golf fundraising event. A then-20-year-old woman, whose identity is now covered by a standard publication ban, alleged that she was sexually assaulted by multiple players after going back to the hotel room of team member Michael McLeod, with whom she’d had consensual sex after meeting him at a bar.
The inside story of how London police handled the woman’s allegations can now be made public after a judge on Friday dismissed the jury at the high-profile sexual assault trial of five professional hockey players, following a complaint from jurors that two defence lawyers appeared to be making fun of them. The case will move forward as a judge-alone trial.
The police’s probe ended in February 2019 without charges being laid, only to be re-opened in 2022 amid intense public pressure when it was revealed Hockey Canada had settled, for an undisclosed sum, a $3.5-million sexual assault lawsuit filed that year by the complainant.
As London police stated in court records in 2022: “The media attention surrounding this event is significant.”
That renewed investigation would ultimately lead to sexual assault charges in 2024 against five players who are now on trial: McLeod, Alex Formenton, Dillon Dubé, Cal Foote, and Carter Hart.
The Crown has alleged that McLeod had intercourse with the complainant a second time in the hotel room’s bathroom; that Formenton separately had intercourse with the complainant in the bathroom; that McLeod, Hart, and Dubé obtained oral sex from the woman; and that Foote did the splits over her head and his genitals “grazed” her face.
Hundreds of pages of documents filed in the court proceedings shed new light on London police’s original investigation, and finally help provide answers to burning questions: Why were no charges laid back in 2019? And what changed in 2022 that led the police and Crown to believe they now had a case?
The timeline of the two investigations
The documents reveal that a veteran detective with London police’s sexual assault and child abuse section spoke to the complainant multiple times in 2018, including several formal interviews, as she went back and forth on whether she wanted to pursue charges. At one point, Det. Steve Newton wondered whether she was being “coerced” to report as a result of pressure from family and friends. He also interviewed four of the five players now on trial (all except Hart), telling them upfront he didn’t have grounds to lay criminal charges. Those who admitted to engaging in sexual activity with the complainant maintained it was consensual.
What appears to have caused Newton the most doubt that a crime had been committed was the video evidence: surveillance footage showing the complainant walking steadily and unaided in heels in the hotel lobby led Newton to question her account that she was too intoxicated that night to consent. And, perhaps most importantly, two video clips recorded by McLeod of the complainant smiling in the hotel room following the alleged sexual assaults; in one of them, she says: “It was all consensual.”
Newton ultimately wondered in a report whether the complainant had been an “active participant” in the events of June 18-19, 2018; he closed the case in February 2019.
Fast forward to three years later, and London police’s Det. Lyndsey Ryan and a team of officers were tasked with taking a second look. While Newton had his doubts that the complainant was too drunk to consent, records suggest that the 2022 investigation approached the case from a different angle: that the complainant only went along with everything because of the intimidating nature of a hotel room full of men she didn’t know, and the players should have known she wasn’t actually consenting.
The complainant exits the lobby of the Delta Armouries hotel in the early hours of June 19, 2018, soon after leaving the hotel room where she alleges she was sexually assaulted by five members of the Canadian world junior hockey team.
Bolstering the police’s case was a new written statement sent by the complainant’s lawyer in the summer of 2022, although police describe it in filings as “substantially the same” as her interviews with Newton in 2018. (At trial, the complainant admitted that the statement contains multiple errors and was actually written by her civil lawyers.)
Police also had text messages between the players from 2018 that had been sent to investigators by their lawyers. And, unlike in 2018, London police decided to get a court order for records from Hockey Canada’s independent investigation into the matter, which included interviews with some of the players now on trial. They had refused to speak to police in 2022 to exercise their right to remain silent, but faced the choice of either participating in the Hockey Canada probe or being banned for life from the organization’s programs — including Canada’s world championship and Olympic teams.
A judge would later toss the players’ statements from the criminal case because the way in which they were obtained was so “unfair and prejudicial” that it harmed the accused men’s right to a fair trial.
Finally, in February 2024, London police announced at a packed news conference that sexual assault charges had been laid against the players, most of whom were now playing in the NHL. Chief Thai Truong offered his “sincerest apology” to the complainant for the length of time it had taken to get to that point, while Det.-Sgt. Katherine Dann said that investigators had followed additional leads, spoken to more witnesses and collected more evidence.
Crown attorneys are required by policy to only prosecute charges laid by police if there is a reasonable prospect of conviction and it’s in the public interest. Behind the scenes, records show that Meaghan Cunningham, the province’s lead sexual assault prosecutor as chair of the sexual violence advisory group, was warning the complainant that while the Crown felt it had met the test to prosecute, it was “not a really, really strong case.”
In a meeting with the woman, her mother, lawyer, and police about three weeks before the players were charged, Cunningham also told the complainant that they didn’t have a “strong argument” that she was incapable of consenting, despite the complainant alleging that in her lawsuit.
“It is an argument we can make, we will make, but a judge looking at the totality of the evidence may not accept that argument,” she said.
But Cunningham assured her they had stronger arguments to make on other issues, according to notes from the meeting. She also told the complainant that if she was pursuing this hoping for a conviction, she might want to reconsider.
“If that is why you’re doing this, (it) may not be worth the personal cost to you,” Cunningham said, according to the notes.
“If you’re doing this to get a conviction, (I) don’t know that will happen. But if it will give you a sense of accomplishment, then we will do everything in our power to get the right outcome. A conviction is absolutely possible.”
The complainant said she wanted to see the case through.
The 2018 investigation: The complainant was an ‘active participant’
Within a day of the initial calls to police in 2018, Newton tried to get in touch with the complainant, who agreed to speak with him but didn’t want to go ahead with charges.
The woman said she didn’t want “him” — McLeod — to get in any trouble, but she also “didn’t want this happening to another girl either,” Newton wrote in his report.
Meanwhile, McLeod was texting the complainant, asking if she had gone to the police; the complainant said she believed her mother had called them.
“But I told her not to. I don’t want anything bad to come of it, so I told her to stop,” she says in a June 20, 2018, message to McLeod. “I’m sorry, didn’t mean for that to happen.”
She was “really drunk” at the time, she said, and “didn’t feel good about it at all after. But I’m not trying to get anyone in trouble, I know I was in the wrong too.”
She said she was fine going back to the hotel with McLeod, but it was “everyone else afterwards that I wasn’t expecting.” She felt like she had been made fun of or taken advantage of, she said.
In the messages, McLeod presses her to tell the police to drop the matter. She finally says: “Told them I’m not going to pursue it any further and that it was a mistake. You should be good now, so hopefully nothing more comes of it. Sorry again for the misunderstanding.”
(McLeod would tell Hockey Canada’s third-party probe in 2022 that he texted her because “we did nothing wrong” and he wanted her to “straighten this out.)What a sleazy privileged soulless shit. Is it any wonder more and more women are choosing to refuse marriage, refuse having kids, and choose to live single in our own homes, making our own careers with our own businesses so that we can avoid non stop sexual abuse as much as possible. Eat your fucking evil heart out Jordan Peterson and Team Rape.
The complainant did end up speaking to Newton and outlined her allegations. She also said that the only reason she told McLeod she wasn’t going to pursue the matter further was so that he would leave her alone. She told Newton that after meeting McLeod at Jack’s Bar, she returned with him to his hotel room, room 209, where they had consensual sex. She said she had become separated from her friends at the bar, and was feeling the effects of alcohol.
Afterward, the complainant reported several of McLeod’s male friends coming into the room while she lay naked on the bed. She said a sheet was placed on the floor, and she fondled herself on it at the men’s request. She also performed oral sex on approximately four men, and had intercourse with McLeod’s roommate (later identified as Formenton) in the bathroom.
“She said that a couple times during this event she got dressed and was going to leave, however, the males coaxed her to undress again, and she complied,” Newton wrote.
She left after having sex once more with McLeod. She soon returned to retrieve a ring in his room, but said that “Mikey” became “mean and derogatory” when she showed up, Newton wrote.
From the complainant’s description of the event, Newton wrote, “it did not sound like at any point she had lost consciousness during this event.”
After McLeod’s teammates entered the room, the officer continued, the complainant “appeared by her account of the event to be an active participant.”
He went on to write that the complainant never reported telling the men she didn’t want to perform those sex acts or asking them to stop; the only instance where this happened is when a man “suggested they insert a golf club and golf balls into (her) vagina.” She told them no, and they didn’t pursue it further.
While it’s difficult to be certain in the early stages of the investigation, Newton wrote that he left the interview with the belief that the complainant wasn’t too intoxicated to make decisions for herself. “And further that there may have been a certain level of consent given her active involvement,” he wrote, adding: “I informed (her) of this concern.”
As the complainant debated in 2018 whether she wanted to see charges laid, Newton continued his investigation, reviewing surveillance footage from the hotel lobby on the night of the alleged incident.
“I cannot conclude from viewing the video that either when arriving or leaving the hotel (the complainant) is overly intoxicated,” Newton wrote in his report. “She is walking in stiletto heels, is not wavering as she walks unassisted. She appears steady on her feet, is not leaning on anything or holding anything/anyone to assist her as she walks.”
He told her the issues in the case “were her level of sobriety as well as the issue of consent.” He said he’d have to review the case with a Crown attorney before deciding whether to lay charges. He also noted in his report that he provided her advice on a lawsuit.
The complainant “acknowledged that she has been getting pressure from family and friends to pursue charges and that this is not necessarily what she wants right now,” Newton wrote.
She told him she’d like for him to “suspend this investigation for the time being,” and that she may contact him again later to have it re-opened.
The 2018 investigation: ‘It was all consensual’
By mid-July 2018, the complainant was again wanting to pursue criminal charges. ”She informed me that she has given the matter more thought and that she does not want to look back on what happened to her in the future and regret not pursuing it further and doing everything she could to ensure this does not happen to someone else,” Newton wrote.
He had been continuing his investigation, as he worked to identify who may have been in the room that night. He spoke to Danielle Robitaille, the Toronto lawyer leading an independent probe into the matter for Hockey Canada, asking that she pass along his message that he wanted to speak to members of the 2018 team who were now spread out across North America. He soon began hearing from some of the players’ lawyers.
The complainant asked Newton if he could access Robitaille’s file, including her interviews with the players. The complainant herself had declined to participate in that probe until the end of the police investigation. Newton said Hockey Canada’s lawyers made clear they wouldn’t turn the file over. He also told one of the players’ lawyers, according to his report, that because he didn’t believe a crime had been committed, he didn’t have grounds to get a warrant for the Hockey Canada file.
What seems to have further cemented Newton’s belief that no charges should be laid were two short video clips sent by McLeod’s lawyer, David Humphrey, in the summer of 2018. They both depict the complainant in the hotel room, as McLeod can be heard asking if she’s consenting. In the first clip, Newton noted she appears to be wiping something from her eye and is smiling.
McLeod asks her off-camera: “You’re OK with this, right?” and she responds, smiling: “I’m OK with this.”
In the second clip, she’s covered with a towel, and still smiling.
“Are you recording me? OK, good, it was all consensual,” she says. “You are so paranoid, holy. I enjoyed it. It was fine. It was all consensual. I am so sober, that’s why I can’t do this right now.”
Newton concluded that the complainant didn’t seem intoxicated in either video. “She does not appear to be in distress or non-consenting,” he wrote.
(McLeod told Hockey Canada’s probe in 2022 that he took the videos “for cover, in case she regretted it at some point in her life.”)So he knew what had been done was wrong. Little shit.
The woman didn’t have a clear recollection of the videos when asked about them, Newton wrote, other than to say the first video would have been taken after the sexual contact with multiple men, and the second video just before she left the hotel room. Although she says in the second video that she’s sober, the woman maintained to Newton that she was actually very intoxicated and “trying to act more sober in their midst as part of putting on a brave face.”
She explained “feelings of being overwhelmed by these males and feeling that she had to follow through with their requests,” Newton wrote.
(Later, in her written statement in 2022, the complainant said she was just saying whatever she thought the men wanted to hear. “It seemed to me that they made these videos because they knew they had just spent hours degrading a really drunk girl,” says the statement.)
By February of 2019, Newton had interviewed or received statements from about half of the approximate dozen players who were believed to be in the room that night and either engaged in sexual activity or watched, and still Newton did not have reasonable grounds to believe a sexual assault had occurred.That’s because Newton is a man.
He interviewed McLeod, Formenton, Dubé, and Foote — at the time Foote was believed to have only been a witness — telling them upfront he did not have grounds to lay a sexual assault charge. The men all maintained the sexual acts they engaged in or witnessed were consensual. Hart refused to speak to police, Newton noted.
After reviewing all of the evidence with his superior, the detective closed the case without laying charges. In breaking the news to the complainant, he told her that the hotel lobby surveillance footage and the clips from the room were a “big part” of the evidence pointing away from her being too drunk to consent.
The complainant “said she was satisfied with the investigation and understands this result,” Newton wrote. “She was happy that she stood up for herself and made this report to police causing the subjects of this investigation to need to speak to what they did.”
(“I was glad that the police tried to investigate, but I was very disappointed that they thought there was not enough to go further,” says the complainant’s 2022 statement.
“I was too drunk to consent, and Mikey and the other guys should have known that. Any decent guy would have seen how drunk I was and not done what they did.”)Was EM drugged?
The re-opened 2022 investigation: ‘Her subjective non-consent’
While Truong wouldn’t comment last year on what led to the investigation being re-opened in 2022, his officers make clear in court records that it was due to public pressure.
“Given a resurgence in media attention, the London Police Service has reviewed this investigation with the aim of determining what other investigative means exist and whether reasonable grounds exist to charge any person,” wrote officer David Younan in what is known as an “Information to Obtain” (ITO) — an application by the police for a court order to seize potential evidence.
Younan wrote in the heavily redacted document in 2022 that as part of the renewed probe, investigators discovered the existence of a group chat between the players from 2018. Some of their lawyers had actually turned the text messages over, and police were just waiting for a court order to view them. Records show that McLeod texted other players: “Who wants to be in 3 way quick,” and Hart replied: “I’m in.”
In the days following the alleged incident, the players had texted each other about the Hockey Canada probe, with McLeod telling his teammates: “We all need to say the same thing if we get interviewed can’t have different stories or make anything up.”
The police also needed a court order to seize the investigative file from that independent investigation, Younan wrote.
He noted that Robitaille had told a House of Commons committee in 2022 that she was in possession of a “range of evidence.” Younan expressed particular interest in the statements the players gave to Robitaille under penalty of being banned from Hockey Canada, statements a judge would later toss from the criminal case. While most of the players now on trial had spoken to London police in 2018 — when they were told upfront that there were no grounds to lay charges — they had declined to speak to police in 2022.
Group text messages between some members of the 2018 world junior hockey championship team after they learned about an internal Hockey Canada investigation. (The texts appear in a multi-page court exhibit and have been excerpted by the Star to fit in a single image.)
“It is reasonable to believe that Danielle Robitaille asked different questions of the players than our own investigators, and therefore, elicited different answers or new information about what occurred,” Younan wrote in the ITO. “Any new information would also afford evidence.”
Court records show police also re-interviewed several people, including the complainant’s mother, who had found her distraught daughter rocking back and forth in the bathtub on June 19, 2018, repeating “it’s all my fault.” Her mother tried to find out what was going on, asking her if she had had a fight with her boyfriend.
“It’s all my fault, I have to break up with (my boyfriend),” her mother reported her saying.
The re-opened investigation focused on two elements, Younan wrote in the ITO: whether the complainant “subjectively consented” to the sexual acts in the hotel room, and whether the players knew that the complainant did not consent.
Unlike in 2018, Younan said in the ITO that London police now had grounds to believe a sexual assault had been committed. Pointing to the complainant’s new 2022 statement, Younan said she “most clearly expressed her subjective non-consent” when she wrote that she didn’t want to do what they were making her do, and that she was unable to say no.
While she may not have been physically prevented from leaving the hotel room, the complainant also felt like she couldn’t leave given the number of “large” men in the room, she said in her written 2022 statement sent to police.
“I was trying to say no, but I couldn’t speak up and things were already happening,” she said.
Younan wrote that when taking a global view of the evidence, the complainant “subjectively believed that she had no alternative but to engage” in the sexual acts.
“Further, I believe that each of the suspects knew or ought to have known that (the complainant) had not consented.”
In her meeting with the complainant just before charges were laid last year, Cunningham told her that while most of the news articles from 2022 “accept as true what is in your statement of claim,” the public’s view of the case could shift as evidence was presented in court. She pointed to the video evidence in particular, while saying she doesn’t look at the clips as proof of whether or not the complainant could consent.
There is a “real possibility that the current perception of what happened could change,” Cunningham said.
Refer also to:
@MatthewBehren11 May 14, 2025:
They’ve been there as EM is been persecuted in the London [Canada] sexual assault trial for 5 male hockey players. They believe EM. They believe survivors. They recognize the pandemic of male violence against women and girls. They recognize the need to take action and stand in solidarity.
World junior sex assault trial: Here’s what has happened in court so far by Sean Boynton Global News, May 15, 2025 8:35
… Hart’s lawyer, Megan Savard, suggested E.M. adopted “the persona of a porn star”….
“When a woman masturbates, a man’s penis falls off.”
“Demolishing the patriarchy since 1989.”
“Misogyny: Look it up. Stamp it out.”
“Male-supremacy”
“Rape”
2019: “It’s the judges!” enabling rape and murder of women. No kidding. In Canada too.
