Polanski defamed me, says UK rape accuser
Actress tells Paris court that director ‘nearly destroyed my life’ when he denied assault claims
BRITISH actress Charlotte Lewis has told a French court she had been raped as a teenager by director Roman Polanski before he launched a smear campaign against her denying the allegations.
“It nearly destroyed my life,” the 56-year-old told a criminal court in the French capital, which is hearing a defamation case against Polanski.
The director, who was not present at yesterday’s hearing, faces charges that he defamed Lewis after she accused him of sexually assaulting her “in the worst possible way” when she was 16 in 1983. She had travelled to Paris for a casting session and appeared in his 1986 film Pirates.
Polanski, 90, is wanted in the United States over the rape of a 13-year-old in 1977 and faces several other accusations of sexual assault dating back decades and past the statute of limitations – all claims he has rejected. He fled to Europe in 1978.
His films include Oscar-winning
Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist. The France-born filmmaker called the allegation that he abused Lewis a “heinous lie” in a 2019 conversation with Paris Match.
According to the magazine, he pulled out a copy of a 1999 article from the now-defunct News of the World, and quoted Lewis as saying in it: “I wanted to be his lover.” Lewis has said the quotes attributed to her in that interview were not accurate.
She filed a complaint for defamation, and the film director was automatically charged under French law.
Lewis told the court that the media coverage after she spoke out in 2010 had given her a “nervous breakdown”, and her then six-year-old son “had to change school because everybody read the articles”.
She said Polanski’s Paris Match interview was “the last drop”.
Stuart White, a former journalist who wrote the 1999 News of the World article, was also present in court.
“The interview I gave to Stuart White was not the interview that was in the newspaper,” Lewis said, adding that she only discovered the article years later. In his contested report about the actress, Mr White described “how she went from hooker to Hollywood”.
Delphine Meillet, Polanski’s lawyer, has said there was no defamation in the
Paris Match article. “Polanski has the right to defend himself publicly, as does the woman who accuses him,” she said.
Describing the time she met Polanski in 1986 in court, Lewis said she only later realised what had happened to her.
“It was the first night I met him. He decided the hotel we were staying in wasn’t great. So, he took us back to his apartment. We went out to dinner. Then we came back, Karen, a mutual friend, went to bed, and that’s when he raped me.”
Asked why it had taken her until the Cannes Film Festival in 2010 to mention the attack, she said: “I didn’t realise it was rape. I didn’t even know that word. I knew what happened to me wasn’t right, but I didn’t know how to put a word to it. He was the only adult man in my life. I have no father, brother or uncle. I had no other male role model. He became the only male role model I had. So it was disturbing. Because of that, I became anorexic.”