Patrick Bruel, one of France’s most famous singers and actors, was taken into custody for questioning on Monday morning over allegations of attempted sexual assault and rape against 13 women dating to 1997, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors announced that they were investigating Mr. Bruel in April, a month after the French investigative website Mediapart reported that eight women had accused him of sexually assaulting them between 1992 and 2019, including two who filed complaints with the police.
Mr. Bruel, 67, has previously denied the allegations. His lawyers did not respond to a request for comment after he was taken into police custody on Monday.
Three women have accused Mr. Bruel of sexual assault and attempted rape, in 1997, 2000 and 2001, prosecutors said in their statement.
The allegations against Mr. Bruel “concern, at this stage, 13 victims,” the Nanterre public prosecutor’s office said. Other women, most of whom have been interviewed, have accused Mr. Bruel of “acts of rape or attempted rape, sexual assault and harassment,” prosecutors said. The investigations also involve accusations of the rape of a 32-year-old woman in Dinard, France, in 2012, as well as a case in Belgium from 2010 that involves a 40-year-old woman.
Mr. Bruel is being questioned on all of these allegations, prosecutors said.
In May, the French journalist and author Flavie Flament announced that she had filed a complaint against Mr. Bruel, accusing him of raping her in 1991, when she was 16 and he was 32. Mr. Bruel “plundered my adolescence,” Ms. Flament wrote on Instagram at the time. That accusation was not among the allegations that Mr. Bruel was being questioned about on Monday, Franceinfo reported.
“So that the truth may come out, so that justice may be served, so that people may stop looking away, I add my voice to those of other women who are speaking out in France, Belgium, and Canada,” Ms. Flament wrote.
In an interview with the French radio station RTL last month, Ms. Flament said Mr. Bruel invited her to his apartment in Paris and offered her tea, which she drank before falling unconscious. “When I opened my eyes, I saw him, he was putting my pants back on me, you know, like a doll,” Ms. Flament said.
In response to Ms. Flament’s accusations, Mr. Bruel said in a statement on Instagram in May that he had “never forced a woman.”
“I have never drugged, manipulated, or sought to subjugate anyone,” he said.
In his Instagram statement, Mr. Bruel had said that he would continue to work and perform. Later that month, a play he was performing in at a theater in Paris was interrupted by feminist activists wearing masks of his face, shouting “Bruel rapist.” After that incident, the theater canceled the remaining five performances. Then he announced the cancellation of all his concerts until September.
Mr. Bruel has also pulled out of a prominent group of singers and celebrities known as Les Enfoirés — the Bastards — that gives performances every year to raise money for a well-known charity called Les Restaurants du Coeur.
Mr. Bruel is not the first high-profile French artist to be accused of sexual assault. In May 2025, the actor Gérard Depardieu — who had been one of France’s most prominent and prolific leading men — was found guilty of sexually assaulting two women on the set of a movie in which he starred in 2021.
In February 2025, a French court found the director Christophe Ruggia guilty of sexually assaulting the actress Adèle Haenel when she was a minor.
The #MeToo movement arrived in France in 2017, but in the immediate years that followed, relatively few cases went to court despite an outpouring of allegations of sexual abuse.
France was relatively slow to adopt the #MeToo movement, as many dismissed it as an unwelcome importation of puritanical American mores on a culture long associated with seduction and harmony between the sexes.
“Persistent or clumsy flirting is not a crime,” the veteran actress Catherine Deneuve and 99 other women wrote in an open letter in a French newspaper in 2018, three months after the French equivalent of the #MeToo movement, known as #BalanceTonPorc (which translates as #ExposeYourPig), took off.
In 2023, President Emmanuel Macron of France defended Mr. Depardieu as he was facing allegations of sexual harassment and assault.
Mr. Bruel has not received such high-powered public statements of support. The mayors of Paris and Marseille — where Mr. Bruel had been scheduled to perform — called on him to cancel his concerts in their cities.
