Fresh sex pest claim against Polanski
A female artist claims movie director Roman Polanski sexually abused her when she was 10 years old.
In an interview with The Sun newspaper this week, Marianne Barnard said Polanski took photographs of her naked on Malibu beach, Los Angeles, in 1975. She decided to break her silence in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sex scandal.
Barnard’s mother initiated the meeting and brought her to a beach where she met Polanski for a photo shoot. She believed the photographs were for a magazine.
“First he was taking pictures of me in the bikini, then it was with a coat, then he said take off the bikini top, which I was comfortable with as I was only 10 and I often ran around with no top on,” she told The Sun.
“But then he wanted me to take my bikini bottoms off. I started to feel very uncomfortable. Then at some point I realised my mom had gone. Then he molested me.”
Barnard, 52, said she suffered post traumatic stress disorder and claustrophobia for decades afterwards.
She is the fifth woman to accuse Polanski of a sex crime. The first was 13-year-old American Samantha Geimer. Polanski, now 84, was charged, but fled the US.
Actress Lupita Nyong’o has become the latest to accuse Weinstein of sexual harassment. The 34-year-old said the encounters ended when she won an Oscar in 2014 and was able to tell him she would not work with him again.
“He was one of the first people I met in the industry, and he told me, ‘This is the way it is’,” she wrote in The New York Times.
She said that when she first met Weinstein another actress told her to be wary of getting on the wrong side of him.
Weinstein is undergoing rehabilitation as an outpatient at a clinic for sex addicts. He has reportedly been barking into his cellphone and claiming that the allegations against him were part of a wider conspiracy.
A source claimed: “In one group therapy session, Harvey arrived 15 minutes late. Then, when it was his turn to speak, he launched into a speech about how this is all a conspiracy against him.
“Harvey fell asleep in his chair,” the source said. His phone woke him and he rushed out the room to take the call, the source said. —