"Never, Ever Have I Abused A Woman:" Gérard Depardieu (image:twitter.com/PETER OSHEN)

The French actor Gérard Depardieu in an open letter, responded to the allegations of rape and sexual assault against him: “Never, ever have I abused a woman”. The allegation was in reference to 2018 lawsuit registered by Charlotte Arnould, French actress. In the letter published at Le Figaro, one of France”s leading daily newspapers, under the title “Je veux enfin vous dire ma vérité,” meaning: “I finally want to tell you my truth,” he writes that he was a victim of lynching orchestrated by a “media court.”

He writes, “To the media court, to the lynching that has been reserved for me, I have only my word to defend myself”.

It was in 2018, in the wake of #MeToo movement, Ms. Arnould filed rape lawsuit against Mr. Depardieu and accused him of having attacked her on two occasions at his Paris mansion in 2018, when she was 22. In 2020, a formal investigation was conducted in this regard. Without citing her name, in the letter he writes that she came to the room consensually,

Furthermore, In April, a French news website Mediapart, published a sexual violence allegation of 13 more women against Mr Depardieu, with some contentions going back to the early 2000s. As per the investigative report, the incidents occurred during the filming of 11 films released between 2004 and 2022. Meanwhile, his lawyers have denied the accusations.

It was for the first time, he responded to the accusations via lengthy letter. Depardieu wrote: “I can no longer allow what I hear, what I have read about myself for several months. I thought I didn”t care, but no, actually no. This all gets to me. Worse still, it wipes me out,” BBC reports.

Mr Depardieu, one of the prolific and mainstream actors in France, worked in more than 250 movies in his career spanning over 50 years.