May 29, 2014: Deborah de Robertis, half-naked, spread her legs beneath Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du Monde ("The Origin of the World," 1866) at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, to denounce the place of women in the art world. The French-Luxembourgish artist got away with a warning after a few hours in police custody. On Wednesday, May 29, 10 years later to the day, de Robertis, 40, was indicted on charges of "damage to cultural property committed as part of a group" and "theft of cultural property as part of a group."

This time, her actions were on a different scale, carried out on Monday, May 6, during the "Lacan" exhibition, mounted by Bernard Marcadé and his wife, Marie-Laure Bernadac, at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. While two accomplices tagged five works with the slogan "#MeToo," including L'Origine du Monde – protected by a pane of glass – the artist stole a piece of embroidery by Annette Messager, bearing the inscription "Je pense donc je suce" ("I think therefore I suck"). In an Instagram post published in the aftermath, de Robertis announced that she would not be returning the work, which was owned by the exhibition's curator, Marcadé.

To justify her actions, the performer posted a disturbing 17-minute video on Vimeo, shot some 10 years earlier – the film, presented as an "artistic work," has since been removed from the platform. It reveals the artist's intimate relationship with Marcadé at the time. In it, he was fully clothed on the bed. She was naked behind the camera. The exchange was explicit. "I want you to suck me. It's the only thing that will get me hard," said the art historian before the camera zoomed in on Messager's embroidery, hanging above her bed.

Marcadé's name appeared simultaneously in a long text published on Mediapart – which has since taken down the text on the grounds of invasion of privacy – alongside those of six other personalities whom de Robertis has accused of "endangering women artists to the point of making them give in, with the sole aim of getting the sex rather than the artwork." They are Fabrice Hergott, director of the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris; Juan d'Oultremont, a former teacher at the Ecole de Recherche Graphique (ERG)in Brussels; the previous director of the Cité Internationale des Arts, Jean-Yves Langlais; French private dealer John Sayegh-Belchatowski, as well as the Canadian collector François Odermatt and Alain Servais, a Belgian collector. On Friday, May 3, de Robertis reported five of them to the Paris prosecutor's office. However, the office indicated to Le Monde that they found no record of this.

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