The Hollywood actor Richard Gere has revealed for the first time the full story behind his mercy mission to the NGO rescue boat Open Arms as he prepares to testify as a witness against Italy’s former interior minister and far-right leader, Matteo Salvini, who is on trial for attempting to block the 147 people onboard from landing in Italy.
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Gere, 72, who lawyers have listed as a key witness to the situation aboard the NGO rescue boat Open Arms, described the scenes of desperation he saw when he arrived on the vessel being held off the Italian island of Lampedusa in the summer of 2019 with conditions rapidly deteriorating.
“We saw more than a hundred people on board,” Gere told the Guardian. “I felt ashamed that we have so much and are not able to embrace these fellow human beings, our brothers and sisters who were starving, traumatised. If they were told the boat was going back to Libya, they would jump in the water and drown themselves, and I felt it was our responsibility to bring as much light as we could.”
The trial of Salvini over the incident, for which he faces a maximum of 15 years’ jail if convicted on charges of kidnapping and dereliction of duty, began in Palermo last month. The judge, Roberto Murgia, has allowed Gere’s testimony after the actor said he was willing to testify on behalf of the refugees. A date has not yet been set for the testimony.
Magistrates consider Gere, who was on the boat but neither a refugee or member of the crew, an objective observer who can lend credence to what they have described as an “explosive situation aboard” with asylum seekers forced to remain on deck for 19 days without receiving medical attention before eventually being allowed to disembark.
The blocking of the Spanish tugboat Open Arms became one of the most notorious consequences of Salvini’s recently introduced security decree that aimed to put an end to NGO rescue missions in the central Mediterranean by imposing fines of up to €50,000 (£42,700) for boats that brought migrants to Italy without permission.
Gere’s journey to the boat began with a holiday in Tuscany. “I was visiting a friend that summer who asked me if I was aware of this new law in Italy, so I asked him to explain it to me. He said: ‘It’s going to be a criminal offence to help people in distress.’
“‘You’ve gotta be kidding me! This is not possible!’ I mean, in deeply Christian Italy, how could this happen? It’s criminal to help people in need? It was mind-boggling to me.”
He put the holiday on hold to fly to Sicily with his son and on 9 August, with a tiny boat packed with supplies of food and water, the Hollywood star made it to the Open Arms vessel.
The final leg of getting to the rescue ship was far from straightforward. When he arrived in Lampedusa from Sicily, Gere and other volunteers from the NGO bought food and water supplies. But there was a problem. The Italian authorities would not allow any boats to get close to Open Arms, which was still at sea.
“There was this man,” Gere says. “He was told by the police that they’d destroy his business and that he’d end up in jail if he helped us. We had the food, but we didn’t have the boat to get the food out to these people.”
Finally, an islander recognised the actor and offered to help. His boat was small, but there was no time to waste. The situation on Open Arms was growing increasingly dire by the hour. With the boat packed with supplies – so many that Gere and the others sat on top of the provisions – the team set off. After an hour on rough seas, they reached the vessel.
Gere and the others immediately distributed food to the migrants. Accompanied by an interpreter, he spoke to almost every person on the ship. “I introduced myself,” he says. “I introduced them to my son. I looked them in the eyes. Most of them didn’t know me or who I was. To them, I was just a worker guy who brought some food and did his best to smile and be kind. We brought water and food, and maybe a sense of hope.
“We were a lifeline to a world of non-torture, of possibilities and dreams. Then I asked them who they are, where they come from. There was a mother with her young daughters who had to navigate the militias trying to make her way to Libya. Of course, these young girls were easy prey, and she had to give herself on every border, she had to give herself to gangs of militias, sexually, to protect her daughters and to take her family to the Mediterranean, where there would be hope and safety. And there she was, 20 miles from safety but unable to reach the shore.”
Gere, who has been engaged in numerous humanitarian causes over the years, began to use his contacts to see if he could get the refugees further help. “I called the Spanish PM [Pedro Sánchez] from the boat and asked him to take some of these people, and as much as he felt the situation, he was politically constrained because of how much the right were pulling strings in Spain. He told me: ‘Look, we’ve been taking a lot of people from Morocco, they come across the water from Morocco. We take too many.’ But basically he said he could only do what his people would allow him to do.
“I called my contacts in Germany, and [Angela] Merkel was obviously the most courageous person in Europe. They were taking in over 1 million refugees, but at that point she felt constrained. In the end, no one was taking responsibility.”
The experience on board the ship would leave an indelible mark on Gere and, as Salvini went on trial, the actor agreed to testify on behalf of Open Arms. It was a not a decision received well across the Italian political spectrum and some on the right have accused him of grandstanding. “You tell me how serious a trial is where Richard Gere will come from Hollywood to testify about my nastiness,” Salvini said. Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the nationalist Brothers of Italy party, declared that Gere was just an “actor seeking visibility”.
Gere, who began his Hollywood career in the 1970s and rose to be one its most bankable leading men, chuckled when asked what he thinks about Meloni’s jibe. “Visibility? Actually I have been searching for anonymity. It’s the opposite,” he says.
“First of all, I don’t know these people. I’ve never met them, but I highly doubt they’ve taken the time to go on a boat and have a human experience and understand the real people they have their influence over. If they did that, then I think there’s probably another conversation to have. You see, I don’t see myself as a movie star. I’m one of 7 billion human beings on the planet, that’s it, no more. I’m no better or worse than anyone.”
He says his motivation was to say what he had seen on the boat. “Look, I don’t know anything about the politics, and I don’t know the defendants in this case. Frankly, I don’t wish him [Salvini] ill, but my concern is the people who are suffering so much. That’s what moves me. It’s possible, because I was there, in the middle of the craziness, my visceral human understanding of it is maybe a little deeper than most people’s. I was a witness, no more, no less. And I can share that with the rest of the world if I’m asked.
“But in terms of the politics of it, I’m not advocating one way or another, of what the Italian people should do. That’s completely up to the Italians.”
Advocating for refugees, poor, sick and homeless people, is a solemn endeavour for Gere. His Gere Foundation supports global development, global health and humanitarian initiatives with a focus in Tibet. He has been a longtime supporter of Survival International, an organisation that defends the human rights of indigenous peoples around the world. He is also on the frontline of the struggle against Aids. He has visited refugee camps from Kosovo to El Salvador.
He first encountered Open Arms five years earlier in Barcelona when he met Oscar Camps, founder of the Spanish NGO. Since then, Gere would regularly check in with him to get real-time information on the status of refugees in the Mediterranean.
“I’m inspired by Open Arms,” Gere says. “I’m deeply committed to their point of view of the universe. They’re dealing up close with these people, and that’s where you want to get your information. […] They said it was deeply serious, not only to them, but to other rescue boats as well. And that’s when I made a very quick decision. I said: ‘Look, I gotta see this for myself.’ I jumped in a car and arrived at the Rome airport in literally five minutes.”
Gere says he is deeply aware that in Italy and in other places in Europe, more than 70 years after the defeat of fascism in the second world war, thousands of people are joining self-described fascist groups. Extreme rightwing groups have become higher profile in the US in recent years while in response to its own migration from the south, videos and photos from the Mexico border have shown Border Patrol guards on horseback chasing down asylum seekers from Haiti.
“We saw during the time of the Nazis how easy it was to think of the other and do horrible things to them,” he says. “It’s a mentality of ignorance, cruelty, the mentality that thinks that we exist personally in our own bubble, and as a country we exist in a bubble – and it’s completely faulty and ignorant.”
Gere is from Pennsylvania. His parents came from a very small town where his father grew up milking cows. And the actor said that the community’s values haven’t changed, with its honest, hard-working people who would do anything for their neighbours.
“But,” Gere says, “they are 95% Trump people. It makes no sense to me. Trump, or the defendants in this case, exploit the people that the rest of us kind of don’t see. That’s what frightens me. We don’t see our own brothers and sisters in our own community deep enough to understand where that darkness is coming from. It’s important for us to really look and not marginalise them, but to embrace them.”
He is most likely to appear via video link and is relaxed about the possibility he may be called at any time. In his Buddhist calm, he adds: “It’s very simple, I’ll just tell the truth, I’ll just tell what I experienced. I’m only here to speak for people who don’t have a voice. It’s not about me. I’m completely irrelevant here. I’m honest with you. I can be invisible. All I am is a witness.”