A court docket in Paris on Tuesday dominated that the movie director Roman Polanski didn’t defame Charlotte Lewis, a British actress who has accused him of raping her, by asserting in a 2019 interview that she was a liar.
Mr. Polanski, 90, is likely one of the most distinguished males to face accusations of sexism and sexual assault within the French film trade, which on Tuesday additionally held the primary day of the annual Cannes Movie Pageant.
A number of ladies have publicly accused Mr. Polanski of sexual assault, although he has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. Ms. Lewis, 56, says that Mr. Polanski raped her 4 many years in the past, when she was 16, throughout a casting session at his dwelling in Paris.
The judges on the Paris court docket didn’t rule on whether or not Mr. Polanski had sexually assaulted Ms. Lewis — solely on whether or not he had legally overstepped his proper to free speech and defamed her by disparaging her account in a 2019 interview with Paris Match, a French journal.
Mr. Polanski has by no means stood trial for sexual assault in France, together with in Ms. Lewis’s case. In her testimony for the defamation case, Ms. Lewis mentioned that she had not filed a rape criticism in opposition to Mr. Polanski as a result of the statute of limitations had expired.
Within the listening to, a prosecutor had expressed doubts about Ms. Lewis’s defamation lawsuit — suggesting that Mr. Polanski had merely expressed an opinion in response to public accusations in opposition to him — and didn’t push for a ruling in opposition to the movie director. In contrast to in the USA, the place such circumstances are sometimes settled out of court docket, such defamation circumstances are virtually all the time robotically despatched to court docket in France.
Within the 2019 interview, Mr. Polanski referred to as Ms. Lewis’s allegations an “odious lie” and cited previous interviews that she gave to British and French publications through which she was quoted talking favorably about Mr. Polanski, who had solid her in his 1986 film “Pirates.” Ms. Lewis has disputed the accuracy of a few of these interviews.
Ms. Lewis advised the court docket in March that Mr. Polanski’s feedback had been a part of a smear marketing campaign that had “practically destroyed” her life after her accusations of rape, which she first made publicly in 2010 and which she repeated in her testimony.
Mr. Polanski, who didn’t attend the court docket proceedings, is a local of France and moved again to the nation in 1978 when he fled the USA earlier than sentencing after pleading responsible to having illegal intercourse with a 13-year-old woman, Samantha Geimer. He stays needed in the USA over the case, however France doesn’t extradite its residents.
