The French movie star Gérard Depardieu was convicted by a Paris court on Tuesday on charges of sexually assaulting two women working on the set of a film in which he was starring in 2021. He received a suspended sentence of 18 months.
The sentence was in line with what the prosecutor had requested after Mr. Depardieu’s four-day trial in March. The actor was ordered to be put on a list of sex offenders.
The judge also ruled that Mr. Depardieu must pay one of the two victims 15,000 euros, about $17,000, in damages and the other €14,040, which included her medical fees.
Mr. Depardieu’s lawyer, Jérémie Assous, said that his client would appeal the decision.
The women — a set decorator and an assistant director — worked on “Les Volets Verts,” a 2021 French film starring Mr. Depardieu.
The set decorator, now 54, who has agreed to be identified publicly only by her first name, Amélie, testified that Mr. Depardieu grabbed her by her waist and pulled her toward him while he was sitting down. Then he locked her between his legs and ran his hands over her buttocks, genitals and breasts while muttering obscenities, she said.
The assistant director, now 34, testified that the actor had touched her breasts and buttocks on three occasions as she walked him from his dressing room to the set in Paris. She has not agreed to be identified publicly.
The judge called their version of events coherent and consistent, and supported by other evidence.
Mr. Depardieu, 76, denied the sexual assaults in both cases.
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He said he was not the “vulgar, rude, trashy person who makes fun of people” that he has been portrayed as in the media. “I respect people. I like to help people,” he told the court in March.
But he also said he was from a different generation and that his flamboyant, bombastic and unapologetic personality was ill-suited for the current era.
From the beginning, it was clear the trial was about more than two sexual assaults by one of France’s most well-known film stars. What happened in the court, instead, was part of a long overdue reckoning about the country’s obsession with seduction, the uncritical adulation of its artists and the stalling in France of the #MeToo movement.
Mr. Depardieu is considered among the greatest actors of his generation, starring in more than 230 films, including “Green Card” and “Cyrano de Bergerac.”
He shot to fame after starring in the 1974 film “Les Valseuses,” in which he played one of two small-town thugs who romp around France, stealing cars, and sexually harassing and assaulting women. He said the film reflected his hardscrabble upbringing in central France as a member of a gang that stole cars and smuggled whiskey and cigarettes.
In 1978 and 1991, Mr. Depardieu told two different American film journalists that he had taken part in his first gang rape at age 9, and “there had been many after that.” Later, he said it had been a translation error and part of an American smear campaign against him. He said he had never raped anyone but had been talking about his sexual experiences.
In France, he was well known for his larger-than-life personality, a man who drove his car recklessly and arrived on film sets drunk. Later, he hobnobbed with dictators like Fidel Castro and Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, and abandoned France for Belgium and then Russia to evade a new tax on the super rich.
He has been at the center of the debate in France over the #MeToo movement since its arrival in the country in 2017, with accusations of sexual abuse piling up against him. He has vigorously denied the accusations and been publicly defended by many prominent and powerful people in the country.
Mr. Depardieu has vigorously denied the accusations and been publicly defended by many prominent and powerful people in the country.
More than 20 women have accused him of sexual abuse, mostly by speaking to French news outlets, particularly the investigation website Mediapart. Six of those women filed complaints with the police — two of which were dropped because they were past the statute of limitations.
Among the prominent people who have rushed to Mr. Depardieu’s defense over the years is President Emmanuel Macron of France, who condemned what he called a “manhunt” against the actor, whom he said, “makes France proud.”
This was the first case against Mr. Depardieu to go to trial.
Three other women in film and television testified as witnesses during the proceedings, describing scenes of sexual abuse they had suffered while working with Mr. Depardieu in the past.
One of them, Lucile Leider, said the actor assaulted her multiple times when she worked as a costume assistant in 2014. She recounted to the court how she had been adding a cape and a hat to his outfit, when she said he pulled her behind a curtain, pressed himself against her and stroked her breasts and genitals while whispering obscenities.
“I remembered saying no with a low voice, but Gérard Depardieu does not know that word,” she told the court. “This man is dangerous,” she said. “Everyone around him knows it and they don’t do anything.”
Sitting on a cube-like stool during the trial, Mr. Depardieu presented a study in confusion and distraction. He mumbled, muddling through semi-responses, and mashed disjointed ideas into run-on sentences. Asked about his health, he talked about Pope John II and St. Augustin. Asked about women, he brought up the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, hospitals he loved and Victor Hugo.
At one point, he admitted he did not know what a sexual assault was, saying it must be “more serious” than just putting a hand on a woman’s buttocks.
He told the court he came from a different generation — one that found his obscene jokes funny — and that he would use vulgar language on the set to irritate people and provoke a reaction.
He “probably” announced it was too hot to get an erection on set, as Amélie had described, he said, “but the obscenity was not addressed to her.”
That era, and his time, he said, was finished.
“I come from the old world, of course, and am not sure if this new world interests me,” he said.
He blamed the #MeToo movement for depriving him of work for three years and said it was likely to “become a terror.” But he also said he believed the freeing of women’s voices was a good thing that he “accepted totally.”
Mr. Depardieu’s lawyer, Mr. Assous, became almost as much a subject of public debate as his client during the trial. Mr. Assous’s courtroom tactics and defense strategy were denounced by more than 180 French lawyers in an opinion piece in the newspaper Le Monde as rife with “sexism and misogyny.”
At a hearing before the trial, Mr. Assous said that the two victims were driven by greed. He also loudly interrupted the court dozens of times, shouting that the plaintiffs’ two female lawyers were “abject,” “stupid” and “hysterical,” and denouncing the trial as “Stalinist.”
He called both of Depardieu’s victims liars, saying one had never been a “real victim.” “We don’t believe you,” he said as he ended one cross-examination.
The court conceded that the women had suffered “secondary victimization” from Mr. Assous’s conduct during the trial, noting that the right to defense did not legitimize “outrageous words and humiliation.” Included in the damages the court awarded them was €1,000 for secondary victimization.
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