Roman Polanski ‘nearly destroyed my life’ when he denied raping me, claims British actress
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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.
Polanski, who was not present at Tuesday’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 Polanski’s 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.
Polanski’s 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 on Tuesday, 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”.
The News of the World has previously been accused of libel and of fabricating quotes. It was forced to close in 2011 after its employees were accused of phone hacking in pursuit of stories.
‘It was the first night I met him’
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.”
‘He became my male role model’
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.’
In 2010, Lewis said she decided to speak out to counter suggestions from Polanski’s legal team that the 1977 rape case was an isolated incident.
Plans for Polanski to preside over the César Awards, the French equivalent of the Oscars, were dropped in early 2017 under pressure from feminists.
Between 2017 and 2019, four other women came forward with claims that Polanski also abused them in the 1970s, three of them as minors. He has denied all allegations.
Among them, Marianne Barnard, a Californian artist, accused him of sexually assaulting her in 1975 after asking her to pose naked when she was 10 years old.
At the 2020 Césars ceremony, actress Adele Haenel walked out in protest at Polanski being awarded for his film An Officer and a Spy.
The director has in recent years kept a low profile. His latest film, The Palace, premiered without him in Venice last summer.
