PARIS - British actress Charlotte Lewis on March 5 told a French court she had been the victim of a “smear campaign” after she accused Franco-Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski of sexually abusing her as a teenager.

“It nearly destroyed my life,” the 56-year-old told a criminal court in the French capital, which is hearing a defamation case against Polanski.

Polanski, who was not present at the March 5 hearing, faces charges that he defamed Lewis after she accused him of sexual abuse in the 1980s.

The 90-year-old is wanted in the United States over the rape of a 13-year-old in 1977 and faces several other accusations of sexual assault dating back decades and past the statute of limitations – all claims he has rejected. He fled to Europe in 1978.

Polanski’s films include Oscar-winning Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist.

Lewis in 2010 accused Polanski of sexually assaulting 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 film Pirates.

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

According to Paris Match, he pulled out a copy 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 said the quotes attributed to her in that interview were not accurate.

She filed a complaint for defamation, and the film director was automatically charged under French law.

On March 5, Lewis told the court that the media coverage after she spoke out in 2010 had given her a “nervous breakdown”, and her then six-year-old son “had to change school because everybody read the articles”.

She said Polanski’s Paris Match interview was “the last drop”.

‘Vice girl’

Stuart White, a former journalist who wrote the 1999 News of the World article, was also present in court.

“The interview I gave to Stuart White was not the interview that was in the newspaper,” Lewis said on March 5, adding that she only discovered the article years later.

In his contested report about the actress, White described “how she went from hooker to Hollywood”.

The News of the World has previously been accused of libel and of fabricating quotes. It was forced to close in 2011 after its employees were accused of phone hacking in pursuit of stories.

White told the court that he interviewed Lewis twice after the paper paid £30,000 for exclusive rights.

He insisted she had agreed to a “vice girl” angle to the 1999 story, but said he could not remember if she had asked to approve the text before it was published.

“We saw it as a morality tale, a young woman used by evil men and women... this was the kind of stuff my paper loved,” White added.

White also said that “I know (Lewis) tells lies,” saying she had admitted to a false denial she had been in rehab.

Polanski’s lawyer Delphine Meillet has said there was no defamation in the 2010 Paris Match article.

But the actor’s lawyer, Mr Benjamin Chouai, told AFP: “Discrediting and defaming (people) is an integral part of the Polanski system.”

In 2010, Lewis said she decided to speak out to counter suggestions from Polanski’s legal team that the 1977 rape case was an isolated incident.

She spoke in the Los Angeles offices of Ms Gloria Allred, a high-profile attorney who has also represented women accusing US producer Harvey Weinstein, sitcom star Bill Cosby and former US president Donald Trump.

Polanski had been detained in Switzerland on a US-issued international warrant in 2009, and was under house arrest there at the time.

Switzerland eventually rejected the US extradition request.

Protest

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

But plans for Polanski to preside over the Cesars, the French equivalent of the Oscars, were dropped in early 2017 under pressure from feminists.

Between 2017 and 2019, four other women came forward with claims that Polanski also abused them in the 1970s, three of them as minors. He has denied all allegations.

Among them, California artist Marianne Barnard accused him of sexually assaulting her in 1975 after asking her to pose naked when she was 10 years old.

At the 2020 Cesars ceremony, actress Adele Haenel walked out in protest at Polanski being awarded for his film An Officer And A Spy.

The director has in recent years kept a very low profile, his latest film The Palace premiering without him in Venice last summer.

The defamation trial comes as French cinema reels from accusations it has too long provided cover for abuse.

At this year’s Cesars Awards, actress Judith Godreche denounced “impunity” in the film industry, after accusing two directors of raping and sexually assaulting her as a teenager. AFP