Paris Court Tries 90-Year-Old Polish Film Director Roman Polanski for Defamation Regarding Sexual Assault 40 Years Ago

The world-famous 90-year-old Polish film director Roman Polanski is on trial in Paris, France, on charges of defaming actress Charlotte Lewis, who accuses him of sexual assault in the eighties and who claimed in court that it nearly destroyed her life.

Lewis claimed to be the victim of a smear campaign after she came forward in 2010, in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival, to say that the director had sexually assaulted her during a casting call at her home in Paris in 1983, when she was 16.

The actress, who played in Polanski's Pirates in 1986, did not denounce him, but testified to the US police. In court, he assured her that he had been kind to her during filming.

Roman Polanski, 90, did not come to court, allowing his two lawyers, Ms Delphine Maye and Alain Jakubowicz, to represent him. 

There, Charlotte Lewis, 56, stated that she "needed to clear her honour". 

At the hearing, she renewed her accusations about that evening in 1983, when she found herself alone with the director after a friend who had accompanied her had gone to bed. 

"He raped me there," she said. 

She explains her long silence: "He was like a father to me, a mentor. I didn't realise the seriousness of what happened to me, and it took me thirty years to realise it."

Throughout his career, several women have accused the winner of three Oscars and the Palme d'Or of sexual abuse and rape, some of them minors.

The award-winning director of The Pianist and Chinatown has always denied the allegations, saying the alleged acts did not interfere with his work. He also denies defamation.

For more than 40 years, he was considered a fugitive in the United States, where he was convicted of having sexual relations with 13-year-old Samantha Gailey.

Defamation and slander are part and parcel of the Polanski system, and it is something Lewis condemns with great courage, said Benjamin Shuai, the actress's lawyer.

Switzerland, Poland and France, where he currently resides, have refused to extradite him to the United States.

He hasn't been seen in France since 2020, when actress Adèle Haenel indignantly left the French César Awards, where he was awarded best director for his film The Officer and the Spy.

Polanski, a Polish Jew whose mother was executed in the Auschwitz concentration camp and a French citizen, rose to fame with Knife in the Water, which he competed with at the 1965 Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film and which opened the door to England, where he directed Repulsion, Dead End and The Vampire Ball.

His wife, the actress Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Family gang, led by the notorious killer and actor Charles Manson. This event shocked Hollywood in 1969.

It is said that the actor and Sharon Tate lived a tumultuous and long-lasting affair and marriage in which alcohol, drugs and even orgies were part of everyday life. It is also said that when Tate was murdered, Polanski came to London upset because she did not want to terminate her pregnancy.

Polanski was involved in "heavy" parties in Hollywood with leading actors and actresses.

Roman Polanski was accused of raping a 13-year-old minor in 1977, but after a media outcry and a trial, it all ended with an illegal relationship with a minor. 

However, the director took off and fled to London to escape the law in the United States.

Roman Polanski lived in France for more than 40 years, where he became a French citizen, and in 2002 he directed The Pianist, which is considered a work of art and for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. 

In 1989, Polanski married Emmanuelle Seigner, 30 years his junior, with whom he had two children. The first girl was born when he was 60 years old.