The British actress criticized the Franco-Polish filmmaker for calling her a liar in the columns of “Paris Match” in 2019.
For several years, she has accused him of having raped her at his Parisian home in the 1980s, when she was 16 years old.
In court, the lawyer for the author of “Rosemary's Baby” highlighted her client's right to freedom of expression.
New legal defeat for Charlotte Lewis. This Wednesday, December 4, the 57-year-old British actress lost on appeal the defamation lawsuit she had filed against Franco-Polish director Roman Polanski. The latter had called her a liar in the columns of Paris Match in 2019, when she accused him of rape in the 1980s. The Paris Court of Appeal has in fact “confirmed the judgment undertaken” in the first instance, after seeing the 91-year-old filmmaker already acquitted last May.
“This is a decision that is very questionable because it offers Roman Polanski a form of media license to kill.“, told by Benjamin Chouai, the lawyer of Charotte Lewis. “He has the right to defame, to discredit, to smear, he will surely continue to do so against Charlotte Lewis but also surely against other women“, he added, not excluding the possibility that the client, absent at the hearing, might decide to appeal to the Court of Cassation.
During a press conference on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival in 2010, Charlotte Lewis recounted having been sexually assaulted by Roman Polanski at her Parisian home in 1983, when she was 16, before he hired her to star in the movie Pirates. At the time, the latter's entourage responded by exhuming an interview given in 1999 to the tabloid News of The World in which the actress said she always wanted to be “the mistress” of the filmmaker.
Interviewed in 2019 by Paris Match regarding the accusations against him, the director of Chinatown et Rosemary’s Baby replied: “The first quality of a good liar is an excellent memory. Charlotte Lewis is always mentioned in the list of my accusers without ever pointing out her contradictions“. Comments which pushed the actress to file a defamation complaint.
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Who is Charlotte Lewis, the actress who is suing Roman Polanski for defamation and accusing him of rape?
During the hearing before the Court of Appeal, Roman Polanski's lawyer, Me Delphine Meillet, asked “in the name of what” and “accused thrown out to pasture in the public square“would not have”the same freedom of speech as his accusers“. In this case, justice was not in fact to determine whether Roman Polanski had raped the actress or not, but only whether or not he had made abusive use of her freedom of expression. Throughout the procedure, he never went to court.
Following the collaboration with Roman Polanski on Pirates In 1986, Charlotte Lewis had started a career in Hollywood. After starring alongside Eddie Murphy in the adventure comedy Golden Childshe would multiply the number of girls before gradually disappearing from the screens. The fault in his accusations? “The defamation was much worse than the rape.”she explained last spring in Le Parisien. “I felt treated like someone who wasn't even a human being (…) I had a nervous breakdown and was blacklisted.”
