French Actor & Director Nicolas Bedos Receives One-Year Prison Sentence With Six Months Suspended For Sexual Assault
Updated with details on house arrest and appeal at 13.51pm PT… French actor and director Nicolas Bedos has been sentenced to one-year in prison with six months suspended for sexually assaulting two women in separate incidents in 2023.
The sentence also carries an obligation for the actor to undergo psychological and alcoholism treatment and be placed on France’s sex offenders list.
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The popular actor, director and writer – whose directorial credits include La Belle Epoque, OSS 177: From Africa With Love and Mr & Mme Adelman – was tried in Paris in relation to three separate incidents alleged to have taken place between 2018 and 2023.
The actor, who did not attend the hearing, was cleared of a third accusation of sexual harassment dating back to 2018.
At a first hearing at the end of September, the prosecuting judge demanded a suspended one-year sentence for the actor and an obligation that he undergo treatment for this behavior.
Bedos will not do jail time. He will serve the custodial part of this sentence under house arrest with an electronic bracelet. Bedos’s lawyer Julia Minkowski said she would be immediately appealing against the sentence.
“I am both stunned and shocked by the deliberations that I have just heard,” she told journalists outside the courtroom.
“This conviction, its severity is completely unprecedented, unjust, totally unacceptable,” she continued. “We’re in a society where for a kiss on the neck or a hand placed on jeans in the middle of a nightclub, we find ourselves condemned to wearing an electronic bracelet for a period of 6 months.”
The first complaint against Bedos was lodged in June 2023, by a 25-year-old woman, who accused Bedos of approaching her in a club and putting his hand on her crotch. In a second complaint, a waitress at the same venue accused Bedos of kissing her on the neck while drunk in May 2023.
In a third complaint, classed as sexual harassment, a woman accused Bedos of following her to the bathroom during a party at a mutual friend’s house in 2018, and then spitting on her after she refused his advances.
Bedos told the hearing in September that he had no recollection of the June 2023 incident. Vehemently denying that he was a sexual predator, the actor and director said his behavior had been down to excessive alcohol and that he was undergoing treatment to deal with the issue on a voluntary basis.
News of the three accusations being brought to court, encouraged other women to come forward in 2023 with allegations against Bedos, dating back to the 1990s.
The Paris Prosecutor’s Office opened a preliminary investigation into the fresh accusations. It was later shelved due to France’s statute of limitations conventions, which gives adult victims between six to 20 years to report sexual violence, depending on the severity of the crime.
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