The film director Roman Polanski has gone on trial for libel in Paris after accusing a British actor who claimed he abused her of “a heinous lie”.
Charlotte Lewis, who was in court in Tuesday at the opening of the hearing, said she had been the victim of a “smear campaign” after she accused the film-maker of sexually abusing her as a teenager.
“It nearly destroyed my life,” she told a criminal court in the French capital.
Lewis has alleged the Franco-Polish film-maker sexually assaulted her in 1983 when she was 16 years old and in Paris for a casting meeting. She accused Polanski in 2010 of abusing her “in the worst possible way”, saying: “He took advantage of me and I have lived with the effects of his behaviour ever since it occurred.”
The director rejected the accusation in a 2019 interview with Paris Match magazine in which he cited a 1999 News of the World interview with Lewis in which she was quoted as saying: “I wanted to be his mistress … I probably desired him more than he did me.”
Lewis disputed the accuracy of the quote and subsequently sued for defamation.
She told the court on Tuesday 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 straw.
Polanski, 90, director of the films Chinatown, The Pianist and Rosemary’s Baby, was not in court for the hearing.
He is still wanted in the US over the rape of 13-year-old Samantha Gailey in 1977. He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sex with a minor but when he was informed a judge planned to rule out his plea deal and send him to prison, Polanski fled the US for Paris. France, Switzerland and Poland have refused requests to extradite him.
Between 2017 and 2019, four other women came forward to claim Polanski abused them in the 1970s, three of them as minors. Among them, the Californian artist Marianne Barnard accused him of sexually assaulting her in 1975 after asking her to pose naked when she was 10 years old.
The director has rejected all the allegations, which are beyond the deadline for prosecution.
Delphine Meillet, the lawyer for Polanski, who was not in court on Tuesday, said there was no defamation in the Paris Match article. “Polanski has the right to defend himself, as does the woman who accuses him,” she said.
Lewis was in court. Her lawyer, Benjamin Chouai, told AFP before the case: “Discrediting and defaming is an integral part of the Polanski system and this is what Charlotte Lewis is very bravely calling out.”
In 2010, Lewis said she decided to speak out to counter suggestions from Polanski’s legal team that the 1977 case was an isolated incident.
She spoke in the Los Angeles offices of Gloria Allred, a high-profile attorney who has also represented women accusing the US producer Harvey Weinstein, the sitcom star Bill Cosby, and the former US president Donald Trump.
Polanski has in recent years kept a very low profile, his latest film, The Palace, premiering without him in Venice last summer.
Plans for the director to preside over the Cesars, the French equivalent of the Oscars, were dropped in early 2017 under pressure from feminists. At the 2020 Cesars ceremony, the actor Adèle Haenel walked out in protest at Polanski being awarded best director for his film An Officer and a Spy.
The defamation trial comes as French cinema reels from accusations it has too long provided cover for abuse.
At this year’s Cesars, the actor Judith Godrèche denounced “impunity” in the film industry after accusing two directors of raping and sexually assaulting her as a teenager.
