French court docket acquits director Polanski of defaming British actress | EUROtoday

Issued on: 14/05/2024 – 14:50

2 min

Polanski, 90, was not in court docket for the decision on the Paris felony court docket.

Lewis informed the court docket in March that she turned the sufferer of a “smear campaign” that “nearly destroyed” her life after she spoke up about abuse that happened within the Nineteen Eighties.

“He raped me,” the 56-year-old actor informed the court docket, explaining it had taken her time to place a reputation on the incident that occurred in Paris when she was 16.

The verdict by this court docket, which specialises in media circumstances, relates strictly to the cost of defamation and never over the actor’s rape accusation towards Polanski.

The filmmaker, whose titles embrace the Oscar-winning “Rosemary’s Baby”, “Chinatown” and “The Pianist”, didn’t attend any hearings of the trial.

Polanski is needed within the United States over the rape of a 13-year-old in 1977 and faces a number of different accusations of sexual assault relationship again many years and previous the statute of limitations—all claims he has rejected. He fled to Europe in 1978.

Lewis in 2010 accused Polanski of abusing her “in the worst possible way” as a 16-year-old in 1983 in Paris after she travelled there for a casting session. She appeared in his 1986 movie “Pirates”.

The France-born filmmaker retorted that it was a “heinous lie” in a 2019 dialog with Paris Match journal.

According to Paris Match, he pulled out a duplicate of a 1999 article in now-defunct British tabloid newspaper News of the World, and quoted Lewis as saying in it: “I wanted to be his lover.”

Lewis has mentioned the quotes attributed to her in that interview weren’t correct.

She filed a grievance for defamation, and the movie director was mechanically charged below French regulation.

‘Not the interview’

Stuart White, who wrote the 1999 News of the World article to which Polanski referred, was additionally current in court docket.

“The interview I gave to Stuart White was not the interview that was in the newspaper,” Lewis mentioned, including she found the article solely years later.

White mentioned he interviewed Lewis twice after the paper paid 30,000 kilos ($38,000 at right this moment’s charges) for unique rights.

He insisted she had agreed to a “vice girl” angle to the 1999 story, however mentioned he couldn’t keep in mind if she had requested to approve the textual content earlier than it was printed.

In 2010, Lewis mentioned she determined to talk out to counter recommendations from Polanski’s authorized workforce that the 1977 rape case was an remoted incident.

Switzerland, France and Poland have refused to extradite Polanski to the United States.

Between 2017 and 2019, 4 different ladies got here ahead with claims that Polanski additionally abused them within the Seventies, three of them as minors. He has denied all of the allegations.

(AFP)