French film star Gerard Depardieu failed to show up in court to face drink driving charges on Tuesday because he was preparing to play disgraced former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn in a film, his lawyer said.
The no-show means the case will turn into a full trial - guaranteeing yet another day in the spotlight for the garrulous actor currently caught up in a scandal over his tax status.
It could also lead to the rotund, 64-year-old star of “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “Asterix and Obelix” getting a tougher sentence if convicted - in theory up to two years in prison.
“Despite wanting to be there and meet the judges and in no way to escape justice, Gerard Depardieu absolutely could not be present,” his lawyer Eric de Caumont told a throng of reporters outside the Paris courtroom.
He said his client was in Montenegro preparing to play Strauss-Kahn, who was seen as the next Socialist president of France before a U.S. sex scandal bought down his career last year.
Depardieu is accused of crashing his scooter in Paris with more than three times the legal limit of alcohol in his blood. No one else was injured in the accident.
Former French screen goddess Brigitte Bardot on Friday threatened to follow Gerard Depardieu in asking for a Russian passport, in protest not at tax hikes, but at the treatment of two circus elephants.
The animals, named Baby and Nepal and owned by a touring circus, are thought to be carrying tuberculosis and were ordered to be put down by a court in Lyon, southern France, on Friday as a precautionary measure.
Bardot’s threat comes a day after fellow actor Depardieu caused a storm in France by becoming a Russian citizen in protest at high tax rates proposed by the Socialist government, which he accuses of penalising success.
“If those in power are cowardly and impudent enough to kill the elephants… then I have decided I will ask for Russian nationality to get out of this country which has become nothing more than an animal cemetery,” Bardot said in a statement.
Owners Cirque Pinder also said on Friday they would appeal to save the elephants, which first tested positive for tuberculosis in 2010 but have since been kept in a zoo in Lyon away from the general public.
Harvey Weinstein will be joining Steven Spielberg and Jerry Lewis in the rarified and very small club of Jewish American filmmakers awarded France’s highest cultural distinction, the Legion of Honor.
Although Weinstein’s big push of the French-made film “The Artist” to Oscar glory late last month has him in the headlines lately, it was already on French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s mind to honor the producer in July of last year. The Weinstein Co. reported that it delayed until late last week the release of a letter to Weinstein from Sarkozy dated July 22, 2011 in order to avoid any conflict of interest.
What would be your attitude toward someone who had plotted to kill you? I can’t help thinking that I’d be more than a little broiges.
You would imagine that the stakes are upped a little when the target of the murder plot is the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of the Shas party. After all, his would-be murderer was planning his death as an act of terrorism, and Yosef famously said in 2001 that it is “forbidden to be merciful” to Palestinian terrorists. People initially presumed that the “them” referred to Palestinians in general, but he then clarified that he meant Arab terrorists.
It was the alcohol and drugs talking, not John Galliano.
That’s the defense being used, predictably, by the English fashion designer, who went on trial in Paris today for anti-Semitic rants made at a restaurant in the French capital in October and February. The comments qualify as criminal hate speech in France, where Galliano faces up to six months in prison and a fine of roughly $32,400.
Galliano, who was fired as the creative director at Christian Dior in March, has repeatedly apologized for the comments, and reportedly entered rehab after being caught on camera declaring, “I love Hitler.” He described himself in court as “a recovering alcoholic, a recovering addict,” and hopes, in his lawyer’s words, to “rebuild himself professionally and personally.” The designer, who is gay, denied being a bigot, telling the court, “I do not have these [anti-Semitic] views, and I have never held them.”
Sure, French automaker Renault made about 30,000 trucks for the Nazis, and even repaired German tanks during World War II. But does that make founder Louis Renault a collaborator?
His granddaughter doesn’t think so. So along with seven other Renault grandchildren, Helene Renault-Dingli is suing the French government over what she calls “the illegal confiscation of the company in November 1944” after claims that it had backed Germany’s war effort, the UK Telegraph reports.
Little had been known about French collaborationist leader Philippe Pétain’s influence on anti-Semitic policies in Vichy France, where he governed from 1940 to 1944.
But according to The Guardian, a draft of a memo, recently revealed to the Holocaust Memorial in Paris, shows Pétain went to great efforts to extend the brutal treatment of French Jews already imposed by the Nazis.
We knew that denying the Holocaust could get a teacher in trouble. But believing in it?
Haaretz reported that the French education ministry has suspended a Jewish teacher in Nancy for teaching “too much” about the Holocaust, “lacking distance, neutrality and secularism” in discussing it — and manipulating her students through “brainwashing.”
But a lawyer for Catherine Pederzoli believes the “witch hunt” might have less to do with the teacher’s lesson plans and more with her origins, according to the UK Daily Mail. “Had the teacher been Christian, no one would have accused her of brainwashing,” said attorney Christine Tadic. “It leads me ask if she is in fact being blamed for being Jewish.” Tadic told the Daily Mail she had filed for an injunction over the teacher’s suspension and a court was due to rule on the matter within two weeks.
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