Paris, France | AFP | Tuesday 05/14/2024 – Sued for defamation by British actress Charlotte Lewis, filmmaker Roman Polanski was acquitted on Tuesday by the Paris judicial court docket.
The 90-year-old director, accused of sexual assault and rape by a number of ladies, together with Charlotte Lewis, described the latter’s accusations as “odious lies”.
The judges of the seventeenth legal chamber, specializing in press circumstances, didn’t should rule on whether or not Roman Polanski raped the British actress or not however solely whether or not or not the filmmaker made abusive use of his freedom of expression in an interview printed by Paris Match in December 2019.
The remarks pursued quantity to a “worth judgment on the fickle nature of the civil get together”, estimated the magistrates. The court docket discerned “a major hole between the admiration and recognition (of the actress) in direction of the director, which she publicly expressed till 2010, and the denunciation of the violent nature of their relationship on the time the place she determined to take part within the vindictiveness dedicated towards him.
Based on the court docket, there may be “no truth within the remarks prone to undermine the respect and consideration of the civil get together”.
“A really unhappy day”
“It’s an essential choice,” stated Delphine Meillet, Roman Polanski’s lawyer, on the finish of the listening to. “We are able to doubt the phrase of an accuser,” she insisted.
Charlotte Lewis, in tears, expressed her “disappointment”. “It’s a really unhappy day for girls who report their attackers,” she stated. Her lawyer, Me Benjamin Chouai, indicated that his shopper would “in all probability” attraction.
Requested in Paris Match concerning 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 liar is “It is a superb reminiscence. Charlotte Lewis is at all times talked about within the listing of my accusers with out ever stating her contradictions.”
The director described the actress’s accusations as “odious lies”.
In 2010, throughout a press convention on the Cannes Movie Pageant, 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.
As an example the “contradictions” in response to them of the complainant, Roman Polanski’s attorneys had unearthed through the trial an interview given by the actress in 1999 to Information of the World wherein she expressed her admiration for the director, who instructed her given a job in his movie “Pirates” in 1986.
“He fascinated me and I needed to be his mistress. I in all probability needed him greater than he needed me,” she reportedly confided to the British tabloid. The actress partly contests the phrases attributed to her by the newspaper.
For Roman Polanski’s attorneys, their shopper was “thrown out to pasture within the public sq.” in “the stifling context of #MeToo”, the motion for the liberation of ladies’s speech.
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 forestall him from working.
He has been thought of a fugitive in the USA for greater than forty years, after 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 heading to Paris. He has since been the topic of a global arrest warrant from the American justice system.
The filmmaker is known as to seem in 2025 in California, throughout a civil trial for the rape of a teenage lady in 1973, accusations that he contests “with the best firmness” in response to his Parisian lawyer.
His new movie, “The Palace”, is launched on Wednesday in France, in additional than 80 theaters in response to the producer.
Offered within the absence of the director on the Venice Movie Pageant in September, the place it acquired a frosty reception, this comedy filmed in English in Gstaad (Switzerland) acquired catastrophic critiques.