After police questioned Depardieu on Monday, the Paris prosecutor said Depardieu would face charges in October over the assaults allegedly committed in September 2021 during the filming of The Green Shutters.

“Gerard Depardieu was given a summons to appear before the criminal court … for sexual assaults likely to have been committed in September 2021 to the detriment of two victims, on the set of the film The Green Shutters,” said a statement.

Earlier, a police source said Depardieu was to be questioned over allegations from two women that he assaulted them on film sets, one in 2021 and the other in 2014.

He was released following the questioning, Depardieu’s lawyer Christian Saint-Palais told reporters.

The first woman accuses Depardieu of assaulting her when she was a member of the crew on the 2022 feature film The Green Shutters.

The set designer, who filed a formal complaint in February, told investigative website Mediapart that Depardieu grabbed her as she left the set in a private hotel in Paris.

She alleged he groped her waist, stomach and breasts, and made obscene comments before his bodyguards removed him.

French actor Gerard Depardieu faces new sex assault complaint

The woman’s lawyer, Carine Durrieu-Diebolt, declined to provide Agence France-Presse with further details.

The second woman has alleged Depardieu groped her “all over” and made “inappropriate” remarks while she was an assistant on the set of 2015 film Le magician et le Siamois (The Magician and the Siamese), she told regional newspaper Le Courrier de l’Ouest.

Depardieu already faces a rape charge, as well as claims of assault from more than a dozen women – all of which he has strongly denied.

“Never ever have I abused a woman,” Depardieu wrote in Le Figaro newspaper in October.

Police in 2020 charged Depardieu with rape and sexual assault after actor Charlotte Arnould alleged he raped her in 2018 when she was 22 and anorexic.

Spanish journalist and author Ruth Baza said in December she had filed a criminal complaint in her home country against Depardieu, alleging he raped her in 1995 in Paris.

Despite the alleged events having passed the statute of limitations, Baza said she decided to file her complaint in the hope that it would “help other people” to do the same.

Actor Anouk Grinberg, a co-star to Depardieu on The Green Shutters, has described how she and others on set were “treated to his salacious nonsense from morning to night”.

“When film producers hire Depardieu on a film, they know they are hiring an aggressor,” she told Agence France-Presse.

Grinberg said producers of The Green Shutters had supposedly appointed someone to deal with harassment issues but that she did nothing.

French actor Depardieu faces being stripped of Legion of Honour medal

French cinema has in recent months been rocked by allegations that it has shrugged off sexism and sexual abuse for decades.

Depardieu’s case has exposed a major split in French cinema and wider society, with some defending his right to the “presumption of innocence” and others supporting his accusers.

Macron later added that he should have emphasised the importance of women speaking up.

Actor Judith Godreche, 52, has become a leading voice in France’s #MeToo movement after accusing two film directors of abusing her as an underage teenager.

Speaking in the upper house of parliament in February, she urged the authorities to reform the French cinema industry to protect young female actors from sexual violence.