Charlotte Lewis, who accuses Polanski of rape, defamation attack

• Filmmaker Roman Polanski has been accused of rape by several women around the world. Among them is the British actress Charlotte Lewis.
• In an interview with Paris Match in December 2019, the director explained that it would take "questioning shrinks" to understand the approach of his accuser.
• According to our information, she filed a libel complaint. If the proceedings come to an end, this could lead to the first trial in France of Roman Polanski.

In this interview, Roman Polanski admitted that he would like to see Charlotte Lewis "out of [her] life". He will have to take his pain patiently. According to our information, the British actress lodged a defamation complaint against the Franco-Polish director after the comments he made about her in an interview with Paris Match on December 11, 2019.

Now 52, ​​Charlotte Lewis accuses the Oscar-winning author of raping her in 1982, in Paris, when she was 16. Last December, when the release of his film J'accuse was disrupted by calls for a boycott, he gave his opinion on this affair in the columns of Paris Match. Denouncing a "heinous lie", the filmmaker had indicated that it would undoubtedly be necessary "to question shrinks, scientists [and] historians" to understand the approach of his accuser.

Extract from the interview given by Roman Polanski to “Paris-Match” in December 2019. - PARIS-MATCH

Words that did not get through. "Charlotte Lewis considers that this interview undermines her honor and her consideration", thus develops a source close to the actress. At the beginning of July, she therefore appointed her lawyer, Benjamin Chouai, to become a civil party with Sabine Khéris, the dean of the investigating judges of the Paris court. This should lead to the opening of a judicial investigation. Asked by 20 Minutes , Benjamin Chouai did not wish to comment on the current procedure.

"I wanted it more than the other way around"

Accused of rape by several women across the planet, Roman Polanski is not currently the subject of any prosecution, the facts denounced being all statute-barred. By attacking on the front of defamation, Charlotte Lewis hopes, no doubt, to force the director to explain himself on the merits in court after the controversy aroused during the Caesar ceremony. At the risk of having to unpack, at the helm, her personal story.

It was in 2010, in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival, that the actress hit the headlines by accusing Roman Polanski of having raped her in his apartment on avenue Montaigne twenty-eight years earlier. But immediately at the time, his testimony had been called into question by an old article in the English tabloid News of the World opportunely balanced on social networks.

Interview in support, it ensured that the young woman had prostituted herself from the age of 14, had chained the conquests and, above all, that she dreamed of becoming Polanski's mistress, attributing this quote to her: “I wanted it more than the other way around”. So many words invented or distorted, according to her.

Years later, via a 1999 interview conducted in Los Angeles and published in Rupert Murdoch's now-defunct The News of the World, Charlotte Lewis offered a much different and incendiary account of her time working w / Polanski. https://t.co/dbyzNTpGpj pic.twitter.com/XV54SFnW6Z

Victory in England, failure in Israel

Roman Polanski remembers it well. During his interview with the journalists of Paris Match , he had not hesitated to produce the disputed press clipping. "We always mention Charlotte Lewis in the list of my accusers without ever checking these contradictions", he lamented at the time.

It may be up to the Paris court to do so if the proceedings come to an end. In 2005, Roman Polanski won a defamation lawsuit against Vanity Fair magazine in British courts. More recently, he was dismissed by the Israeli justice system after opening a similar procedure against Matan Uziel, an activist, creator on the Internet of a platform intended to collect the testimonies of the victims of the filmmaker.

Contacted by 20 Minutes , Hervé Témime, the filmmaker's lawyer, simply indicated that he was not "informed" of the filing of a defamation complaint against Charlotte Lewis and that he did not wish to make "any comment".

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• Caesar 2020
• Video
• Roman Polanski
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• Defamation
• Rape