So long Gérard Depardieu

France seems like a changed beast from the #MeToo days and post the Gisele Pelicot trial

“Never, absolutely never, have I abused a woman. Hurting a woman would be like kicking my own mother in the stomach”

Gérard Depardieu in Le Figaro, 2023

Luckily the Paris court where he was being tried for sexual assault didn’t believe all these BS filmi dialogues. It handed Depardieu a guilty verdict and an 18-month suspended prison sentence. It’s quite hilarious how so many men charged with sexual crimes invoke their wives or mothers. The world needs more mothers like Pete Hegseth’s to pen their son’s misdemeanours in black and white, so they can’t be misquoted by their criminal sons. Depardieu has been accused of rape or sexual assault by more than a dozen women; this case was about the accusations of two of these women.

But that’s not the point of this Substack. I’m just blown away by the seismic shift in a country where 100 prominent women including Catherine Deneuve signed a letter saying the #MeToo movement had gone too far. The letter echoed Depardieu’s description of the #MeToo movement as a “reign of terror”. I guess that’s what it must feel like to men who are forced to give up their God-like sense of impunity because of the insistent cries of previously silent survivors.

That outrageous letter said that men were being punished for nothing more than “touching a knee”. The 2018 letter also said:

“Already, editors are asking some of us to make our masculine characters less “sexist” and more restrained in how they talk about sexuality and love, or to make it so that the “traumas experienced by female characters’ be more evident! Bordering on ridiculous, in Sweden a bill was presented that calls for explicit consent before any sexual relations! Next we’ll have a smartphone app that adults who want to sleep together will have to use to check precisely which sex acts the other does or does not accept.”

But so much has changed since. It’s likely the Merci Gisele effect.

France will forever be known as the country where Gisele Pelicot last year waived her rights to anonymity and took on 51 men who had assaulted and raped her after her husband drugged her. She attended the trial, faced them head on, fought for the video evidence to be shown publicly and impacted French society like a meteor from outer space.

In February this year, a Paris court found filmmaker Christophe Ruggia guilty of sexually assaulting actor Adèle Haenel when she was between 12 and 15 in the early 2000s. It was the country’s first big #MeToo trial.

The Depardieu verdict came on the opening day of the Cannes Film Festival, where sexual abuse has increasingly been a topic of discussion. Last year the festival screened a short film by actor and director Judith Godreche titled Moi Aussi (Me Too). It features voices of survivors, young and old, female and male. It’s a long journey from the time convicted sex offender and former Hollywood raja Harvey Weinstein lured women to his hotel room in Cannes with the promise of work.

Now all we need is for France to discuss its systemic racism problem as openly as it is speaking about sexual assault.