Roman Polanski will soon be decided on his fate. Actress Charlotte Lewis is suing him for defamation for calling her a liar when she accused him of rape. The 17th criminal chamber of the Paris judicial court will make its decision known on Tuesday at 1:30 p.m. The judges do not have to rule on whether Roman Polanski, 90, raped the British actress or not. They must only decide whether or not he made abusive use of his freedom of expression in an interview published by Paris Match in December 2019.
Asked about the accusations of sexual assault and rape made against him by several women, including Charlotte Lewis, the director of Rosemary’s Baby replied: “You see, the first quality of a good liar is an excellent memory . Charlotte Lewis is always mentioned in the list of my accusers without ever pointing out her contradictions.
In 2010, during a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, Charlotte Lewis recounted having been attacked during a casting organized at Roman Polanski’s house in Paris in 1983, when she was 16 years old. The director described the actress’s accusations as “odious lies”.
During the trial in March, the 56-year-old actress denounced “a smear campaign” which “nearly destroyed [her] life” after her revelations. “I would have preferred not to say anything. Today, if a woman comes to me and tells me she was raped and asks me if she should reveal it, I will tell her: no, she said. Draw a line under all that, get on with your life,” the actress said at the stand, via an interpreter. Roman Polanski was not present at the hearing.
To illustrate the plaintiff’s “contradictions”, her lawyers cited an interview given in 1999 to News of the World where she expressed her admiration for the director, who in 1986 gave her a role in his film Pirates. “He fascinated me and I wanted to be his mistress. I probably wanted him more than he wanted me,” she told the British tabloid. The actress partly contests the words attributed to her by the newspaper.
For Roman Polanski’s lawyers, their client was “thrown out to pasture in the public square” in “the stifling context of
Roman Polanski, who notably won an Oscar and a Palme d’Or at Cannes for The Pianist, has been accused of sexual assault and rape by around ten women over the course of his career, assertions that he has always contested and which did not prevent him from working. He has been considered a fugitive in the United States for more than forty years, after a conviction for “illegal sexual relations” with a 13-year-old minor, Samantha Gailey (now Geimer).
In 1977, arrested, accused of having drugged and raped this teenager, he spent 42 days in prison before being released and fleeing to Paris. He has since been the subject of an international arrest warrant from the American justice system. The filmmaker is called to appear in 2025 in California, during a civil trial for rape of a teenage girl in 1973, accusations that he contests “with the greatest firmness” according to his Parisian lawyer.