Roman Polanski acquitted in trial towards Charlotte Lewis – Libération

Sexual violence file The Paris court docket acquitted the filmmaker on Tuesday, Could 14, accused of defamation by actress Charlotte Lewis. In an interview with “Paris Match” in December 2019, the director brushed apart the accusation of rape made towards him by the actress and spoke of a “odious lie”.

A couple of hours earlier than the parade of worldwide stars on the purple carpet on this opening day of the Cannes pageant, the filmmaker Roman Polanski was acquitted this Tuesday, Could 14 within the trial which opposed him to the British actress Charlotte Lewis. She sued him for defamation for calling her a liar when she accused him of rape.

The judges of the seventeenth prison chamber of the Paris judicial court docket didn’t should rule on whether or not Roman Polanski, 90, raped Charlotte Lewis or not. Their position was solely to resolve whether or not or not the Franco-Polish filmmaker made abusive use of his freedom of expression in an interview revealed by Paris Match in December 2019.

Revelations throughout the Cannes Movie Competition

Requested in regards to the accusations of sexual assault and rape introduced towards him by a number of ladies, together with Charlotte Lewis, the director of “Rosemary’s Child” replied: “you see, the primary high quality of a great liar is a wonderful reminiscence. Charlotte Lewis is at all times talked regarding within the listing of my accusers with out ever stating her contradictions. The director additionally described the actress’s accusations as “odious lies”.

In 2010, throughout a press convention on the Cannes Movie Competition, Charlotte Lewis recounted having been attacked throughout a casting organized at Roman Polanski’s home in Paris in 1983, when she was 16 years previous. Through the trial in March, the 56-year-old actress denounced “a smear marketing campaign” which “virtually destroyed (her) life” following her revelations. “I might have most popular to not say something. Immediately, if a girl comes to inform me that she was raped and asks me if she ought to reveal it, I’ll inform her: no. Draw a line below all that, go on together with your life,” the actress stated on the stand, by way of an interpreter. Roman Polanski, who was dealing with his first trial of its form in France, was not current on the listening to.

As an example the complainant’s “contradictions”, her legal professionals cited an interview given in 1999 to Information of the World the place she expressed her admiration for the director, who in 1986 had given her a job in his movie “Pirates”. “He fascinated me and I wished to be his mistress. I most likely wished him greater than he wished me,” she reportedly confided to the British tabloid. The actress partly contests the phrases attributed to her by the newspaper.

For Roman Polanski’s legal professionals, their consumer was “thrown out to pasture within the public sq.” in “the stifling context of #Metoo”, the motion for the liberation of girls’s speech. He has “the appropriate to defend himself”, his counsel insisted, denouncing “an absurd trial”. The prosecutor didn’t request a conviction following her submissions.

A dozen accusations

Roman Polanski, who notably received an Oscar and a Palme d’Or at Cannes for “The Pianist”, has been accused of sexual assault and rape by round ten ladies over the course of his profession, assertions that he has at all times contested and which didn’t stop him from working. He has been thought-regarding a fugitive in america for greater than forty years, following a conviction for “unlawful sexual relations” with a 13-year-old minor, Samantha Gailey (now Geimer).

In 1977, arrested, accused of getting drugged and raped this teenager, he spent 42 days in jail earlier than being launched and fleeing to Paris. He has since been the topic of a global arrest warrant from the American justice system. The filmmaker known as to look in 2025 in California, throughout a civil trial for rape of a teenage woman in 1973, accusations that he contests “with the best firmness” based on his Parisian lawyer.