Stylist Simone Harouche has told a court that on the night Kim Kardashian was robbed in Paris she was woken by the US star’s screams of terror and feared she had been “raped or violated”.

Wearing a black jacket and bulky gold necklace, Ms Harouche, 45, spoke to Judge David de Pas in the Voltaire room of Paris’s criminal court via an interpreter, describing the robbery that took place in the French capital nearly a decade ago.

Ms Harouche, who says she has worked for Kardashian for many years and has been friends with her from childhood, told the court she was woken by “a sound I had never heard from Kim… It was terror”.

Sleeping in a separate apartment, on the next floor down from Kardashian’s, she went on: “What I heard specifically was [Kim saying], ‘I have babies and I need to live – that is what she kept saying… Take everything. I need to live'”.

She told the judge: “When I realised something terrible was going on upstairs and I realised it was not friends [in Kim’s room] I started looking for my telephone and I started looking for something to help save mine and Kim’s life.”

She went on to lock herself in her bathroom and hide in her shower, where she called Kardashian’s sister Kourtney and texted her security guard, Pascal Duvier, telling them, “Something is very wrong… Kim is upstairs with men and we need help.”

She says minutes later, Kardashian entered her room, explaining: “To see my friend with her feet taped and a very light robe with nothing under, and all messed up and pulled, I thought she could have been raped or very violated.”

She said Kardashian was highly emotional, adding: “She was beside herself, I’ve never seen her like that before. She was screaming, ‘We need to get out, what do we do if they come back? We need to jump from the first floor, we need to get out.'”

Describing Kardashian as “not in her body”, she said she thinks the star “was still in trauma” while they waited for help after the robbery, and went on to describe the scene following the incident as “very chaotic”.

Later on Tuesday, Kardashian herself will face 10 defendants who it is alleged pulled off one of the most audacious celebrity heists in modern French history in the early hours of 3 October 2016.

The trial is now entering its third week.

Read more: Everything you need to know about the Paris trial

In the French capital for Paris Fashion Week, Kardashian has previously said she was home alone in the early hours of 3 October, while her sister Kourtney and entourage – including her security guard – went out clubbing.

It’s alleged that five masked men posing as police officers stormed the residence, with two entering Kardashian’s room and robbing her at gunpoint.

She says she was then bound and gagged with tape and cable ties and left in the bathtub.

Police say the men escaped on bicycles, with around $9m of jewellery, including a $4m engagement ring from Kardashian’s then-husband Kanye West.

Most of the jewellery was never recovered.

Ahead of her in-person appearance, Kardashian’s lawyers said she was ready to “confront” her Paris attackers and intended to do so “with dignity and courage”.

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Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan has pleaded not guilty to harassing a transgender woman and damaging her phone.

The Bafta-winning writer, who also came up with TV sitcoms The IT Crowd and Black Books, appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Monday to deny the charges of harassing Sophia Brooks on social media and damaging her mobile in October.

Linehan, 56, who created the three-season sitcom Father Ted in the 1990s with fellow Irish writer Arthur Mathews, said in a post on X in April that the allegations were related to an incident at the Battle of Ideas conference in London on 19 October.

Court documents show Linehan is charged with harassing the alleged victim, a transgender activist, by posting abusive comments about her on social media between 11 October and 27 October, and damaging her phone to the value of £369 on the day of the conference.

Outside court after the short hearing, he wore a T-shirt with a picture of a Daily Telegraph front page with the headline ‘Trans women are not women’, and said: “For six years, ever since I began defending the rights of women and children against a dangerous ideology, I have faced harassment, abuse and threats.

“I’ve lost a great deal, but I am still here, and I will not waver in my resolve.”

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Deputy District Judge Louise Balmain told Linehan his trial would take place on 4 September this year at the same court.

Linehan has become a strong vocal critic of the trans rights movement in recent years.

He was freed on bail with the condition not to contact the complainant directly or indirectly.

One of France’s most successful actors has been accused of sexually assaulting two women on the set of one of his films.

Gerard Depardieu, 76, has starred in more than 200 films over five decades, winning two best lead actor awards at the Cesars, as well as being nominated for an Oscar and 15 other Cesars.

On Tuesday, judges at the Tribunal de Paris are expected to reveal whether he has been found guilty of the two counts of sexual assault alleged to have happened in 2021, both of which he denies.

If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison or a fine of €75,000 (£62,000).

While the #MeToo movement ultimately led to the downfall of Hollywood film director Harvey Weinstein in the US, France’s #balancestonporc equivalent has struggled to gain momentum.

But Depardieu’s court case, coming soon after that of Gisele Pelicot, who waived her anonymity to reveal her husband had orchestrated her drugging and rape by more than 50 men, is proof for many that France is finally getting its own #MeToo moment.

Here, Sky News looks at the case – and what it means for women’s rights in France.

What is he accused of?

Depardieu is accused of sexually assaulting two female crew members on the set of the film Les Volets Verts (Green Shutters) in 2021.

The anonymous women both claim the actor forced himself on them on multiple occasions, touching them over their clothes, the court was told.

The first woman said in one incident, as she passed him in a corridor he grabbed her, pinned her down between his legs and rubbed himself against her waist, hips, and chest, making accompanying gestures and lewd comments.

The other woman claimed he touched her buttocks in public on more than one occasion, as well as touching her chest.

Depardieu denies the allegations and appeared in person at the Tribunal de Paris, telling the court: “I’ve always been told I have a Russian nature, I don’t know if it’s because of the drinking or the vulgarity.”

But he added: “I’m not touching the butts of women.”

Read more
Inside court at Depardieu’s trial
Depardieu acknowledges his ‘vulgarity’

One of the alleged victims claimed he behaved “like a madman” who took “pleasure in frightening me”.

Depardieu responded: “I understand perfectly if she’s a bit upset. I am capable of trash talk… I don’t have to talk like that, get angry like that, voila.”

He also claimed that he had been in a “bad mood” because the set was hot, which was difficult for him, being overweight.

The trial was due to start in October but was postponed until March after Depardieu’s legal team asked for a six-month delay due to his poor health. Suffering complications from diabetes and high blood pressure, they said he was unable to sit for long periods.

Separately, he also remains under investigation for the alleged rape and sexual assault of a 22-year-old actress. The woman claims Depardieu sexually assaulted her twice at his home.

She originally reported the alleged incidents in 2018 but the charges were dropped in 2019 following a nine-month investigation.

However, the case was reopened in October 2020 when the woman refiled the complaint.

In March 2022, Depardieu’s bid to get the case thrown out was rejected by Paris’s court of appeal, with authorities saying he would remain under investigation until the matter is either sent to trial or dismissed. He denies the allegations.

In April 2023, investigative French media outlet Mediapart reported claims of 13 women who said Depardieu sexually assaulted or harassed them between 2004 and 2022.

In an open letter in the newspaper Le Figaro that October, Depardieu said he had “never abused a woman”.

A group of 50 French stars, including singer and wife of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy Carla Bruni, wrote their own open letter defending him in Le Monde, condemning what they described as his “lynching” and describing him as “probably the greatest” French actor.

A week later, President Emmanuel Macron condemned the “manhunt” for Depardieu, calling him an “immense actor” who “makes France proud”.

Who is Gerard Depardieu?

Depardieu was born in Chateauroux, central France in 1948. He left home at the age of 16 for Paris, where he got his first acting job with a travelling theatre company.

After a few minor film roles, his break came in 1973 with a lead part in Bertrand Blier’s film Les Valseuses (Going Places) – alongside his former theatre friends Patrick Dewaere and Miou Miou.

From there his popularity boomed and he became one of the most prolific French actors of the 1980s and 1990s.

He won awards for his roles in The Last Metro and Cyrano de Bergerac, which also received an Oscar nomination. He was made president of the Cannes Film Festival jury in 1992.

His success also saw him become a Chevalier of France’s Legion d’Honneur and its Ordre national du Merite – two of the country’s most prestigious honours.

Read more from Sky News
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Across roughly 250 films, he has worked with more than 150 directors, including Jean-Luc Godard and Ridley Scott.

He became close friends with Robert De Niro after they starred together in Bernardo Bertolucci’s film 1900 in 1976.

Depardieu married fellow actor Elisabeth Depardieu in 1971. She starred alongside him in Jean de Florette and Manon Of The Spring in 1986. They had two children, who both became actors. Their son Guillaume died from pneumonia aged 37 in 2008. The couple divorced in 1996.

He announced his retirement from acting in 2005, claiming he had made “enough” films and wished to pursue other things.

In 2012 he moved to Belgium to avoid paying taxes in France. He wrote an open letter to the then prime minister, saying he was surrendering his French passport because he wanted “nothing to do” with his home country and the government was trying to “punish success”.

Vladimir Putin personally signed an executive order to give him Russian citizenship in 2013. Two years later his films were banned in Ukraine over comments he made questioning the country’s sovereignty as an independent state. He has since condemned Russia’s war there.

He also claims to have been given citizenship by the United Arab Emirates.

In 2023 he was stripped of his National Order of Quebec after a documentary revealed him making lewd comments and sexual gestures on a trip to North Korea in 2018, which the region’s premier described as “shocking”.

Why is the Depardieu case so important in France?

The #MeToo and #TimesUp movements in the US saw women in the creative industries calling out sexual harassment and assault by their male counterparts.

But it “didn’t really take off in France” in the same way, Sarah McGrath, chief executive of Women For Women France, an organisation fighting against gender-based violence, tells Sky News.

While she saw colleagues around the world “thrilled that victims could finally feel confident to talk about the crimes they’d be subjected to”, she says in France “we had a very different experience”.

In 2018, dozens of female French stars and intellectuals signed an “anti-MeToo manifesto”, condemning the movement as a “witch hunt” and defending men’s sexual freedom to proposition women.

Although some, notably Depardieu’s co-star and friend Catherine Deneuve, have publicly U-turned on the issue, it demonstrated a resistance to change in French society.

Blanche Sabbah, a French feminist activist and comic book author, says: “We love to talk about being the cultural exception in France.

“We have this idea that if you are some kind of artistic genius then you are less accountable for bad behaviour – and that we’re more sexually liberated – and don’t concern ourselves with moral panics like in the US. I think that stopped the [MeToo] movement in its tracks.”

Ms McGrath describes this “cultural exception” as “an attitude that a man’s reputation and livelihood is more important than victims”.

Both women also point to a “general distrust” of claimants and “false ideas” they are bypassing the courts and telling their stories in the media to “get money”.

“It’s simply not true and comes from a lack of understanding that the French justice system does not play a protective role for victims of sexual violence,” she says.

“Victims are actually more likely to come out with debts of thousands of euros if they go through the justice system, which far exceeds any compensation they might get.”

But while the “balancestonporc” – report your pig – hashtag struggled to gain momentum in 2018, the women say they have seen a shift – particularly following the case of Gisele Pelicot and the conviction of her husband for raping and inviting at least 50 other men to rape her while she was drugged and unconscious.

“It’s taken time, but finally we’re getting somewhere,” Ms Sabbah says. “Gisele’s case serves as a reminder that our culture has a huge influence on how we behave.”

Those found guilty in the Pelicot case were aged between 20 and 70 and included a journalist, nurse, firefighters, and a DJ.

“She has proven that this is the problem of every man – that what you think your favourite movie star can do serves as an argument for justifying what crimes you would commit as a ‘normal’ person’,” Ms Sabbah adds.

Regardless of the outcome of the Depardieu case, both women agree that his prosecution represents a “huge step forward” for women’s rights and victims of gender-based violence.

“There have been three or four convictions [of men for gender-based violence] recently, so I think the way those cases are perceived now is different to how it was in 2018,” Ms Sabbah says.

“We have gone from ‘classement sans suite’ (no further action) to movie stars on trial.”