Published6. March 2024, 09:36
Paris: Polanski’s lawyers denounce an absurd trial
The director is tried in his absence for having called the actress Charlotte Lewis a liar who accused him of rape.
Charlotte Lewis says she regrets speaking out about her rape by Polanski, the consequences having almost ruined her life.
AFP
For years we didn’t believe her when she said he had raped her, and then an interview appeared with Roman Polanski “calling her a liar”. “That was the last straw,” said Charlotte Lewis before the Parisian court which is trying the Franco-Polish director for defamation.
It was Roman Polanski who was on trial on Tuesday, but the 90-year-old multi-award-winning filmmaker, accused of rape and sexual assault by around ten women, was absent, only represented by his lawyers. So, all eyes in the room are on Charlotte Lewis, the very thin 56-year-old woman, dressed all in black, who came from the United Kingdom to testify at the bar.
In the early 1980s, the actress says through an interpreter, she was 16 and working as a model in London. “People ask me if I want to act in a film, if I want to meet Roman Polanski.” Arriving in Paris with “Karen”, another older model, she is installed in a small hotel that Roman Polanski “finds not great”, so he installs them in his apartment.
“We went to dinner, we went back to the apartment, Karen went to bed and left me alone with Roman. And that’s when he raped me,” says Charlotte Lewis.
“I didn’t know it was rape”
“Why” then shoot in his film “Pirates”, promote the film, “why don’t you denounce him?”, asks his lawyer Benjamin Chouai. “I didn’t know that what happened to me was rape “, replies Charlotte Lewis. “He wasn’t horrible, he didn’t beat me… and we started working together. I respected him, he was nice to me,” she continues.
She publicly denounced these facts for the first time in 2010, in the United States where Roman Polanski has been considered a fugitive since the 1970s after a conviction for “illegal sexual relations” with a 13-year-old minor.
The dialogue with the court then becomes more complicated: Charlotte Lewis is angry, but not necessarily against Roman Polanski, wants to respond quickly, alternately interrupts the president or the interpreter who is painfully trying to translate her. “Slow down Charlotte,” her lawyer regularly asks her behind her back.
“A smear campaign”
“Do you regret having spoken?” asks his lawyer. “Yes, I would have preferred not to say anything. Today, if a woman comes to me and tells me she was raped and asks me if she should reveal it, I will tell her: no. Draw a line under all that, move on with your life.”
“Who accused who?”
An “accused thrown out into the open still has the right to defend himself,” protests Delphine Meillet, one of Polanski’s lawyers. In “the stifling context of #Metoo”, the movement for the liberation of women’s speech, “public testimony has the value of proof, which has the value of truth”, she regrets.
“Who accused who? and the worst thing there is…”, adds his colleague Alain Jakubowicz, denouncing an “absurd trial”.
The judgment will be delivered on May 14.
(afp)