For years we didn't believe her when she said he raped her, and then an interview came out in which Roman Polanski called her “a liar.” “That was the last straw,” Charlotte Lewis told the Paris court that is suing the French-Polish director for libel.
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It is Roman Polanski who is in court on Tuesday, but the 90-year-old multi-award-winning director, who has been accused by around ten women of rape and sexual assault, is absent and is represented only by his lawyers.
So all eyes in the room are on Charlotte Lewis, the very beautiful 56-year-old woman, dressed all in black, who came from the United Kingdom and was “determined to go all the way,” she told the court through an interpreter.
AFP
In the early 1980s, the actress tells the bar, she was 16 years old and working as a model in London. “People ask me if I want to be in a movie, if I want to meet Roman Polanski.”
When she arrives in Paris with Karen, another older model, she is put up in a small hotel that Roman Polanski “doesn't like,” so he puts her up in his apartment.
“We went to dinner, we went back to the apartment, Karen went to bed and left me alone with Roman. And then he raped me,” says Charlotte Lewis on the witness stand.
“And yet,” explains actress Me Benjamin Chouai’s lawyer, “Charlotte Lewis then smiles “for the photo” while filming “Pirates” with the director promoting the film. “Why don’t you denounce him?” said the lawyer.
“I didn't know that what had happened to me was rape, I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't name it,” explains the woman, who was still a teenager at the time. .
“He wasn’t terrible, he didn’t hit me… and we started working together. I respected him, he was nice to me, he told me what books to read,” continues Charlotte Lewis.
She first publicly denounced these facts in 2010 in the United States, where Roman Polanski has been considered a fugitive since the 1970s after he was convicted of “illegal sexual relations” with a 13-year-old minor.
“Draw a line”
What follows is more difficult to follow and the dialogue with the court becomes complicated: Charlotte Lewis is angry, but not necessarily against Roman Polanski, wants to react quickly, alternately interrupting the president or the interpreter who is laboriously trying to translate her.
“Slow down, Charlotte,” her lawyer regularly tells her behind her back.
The bottom line, she said, is that “people don't believe the allegations she made in 2010” and that her life is becoming hell. In particular, due to an old article published ten years earlier in a British tabloid and, according to her, unearthed by the philosopher and writer Bernard Henri-Lévy on his website.
In this article she is quoted as saying – falsely in her opinion – that she was a prostitute when she was 14 and dreamed of being Roman Polanski's “mistress”.
“It's like I've been thrown under a bus, I've experienced a smear campaign. It almost destroyed my life,” says Charlotte Lewis, between angry sobs recalling the people staring at her on the street, the birthday parties her son is no longer invited to, and her Internet reference systematically ending with “Prostitute 14 years “is linked”.
“Do you regret speaking?” asks his lawyer.
“Yes, I would have preferred not to say anything. If a woman comes to me today and tells me that she was raped and asks me if she should disclose it, I will tell her: No. “Draw a line under all this and move on with your life,” she says in a harsh tone.
This interview with Roman Polanski at Paris Match in 2019, in which he speaks of “vile lies”, raises the need to ask “psychologists” about the Charlotte Lewis case, it is “the last straw”, she says.
“You see, 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,” the director explained, referring to the old tabloid article.
The hearing continues on Tuesday evening with the hearing of the author of the article cited by Roman Polanski's defense.