A French court has dismissed charges against French-Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski that he defamed UK actor Charlotte Lewis after she accused him of sexually assaulting her as a teenager.
Lewis told a Paris court in March that she had been subjected to a “smear campaign” after speaking up about alleged sexual abuse by Polanski in the 1980.
The actor originally made her allegations in a press conference in Cannes in 2010, saying Roman Polanski had taken advantage of her in the worst possible way during a casting meeting in Paris in 1983 when she was 16 years old. She would later go on to star in his 1986 film Pirates.
Roman Polanski denied the accusations in an interview in French celebrity magazine Paris Match in 2019, calling them a “heinous lie.”
He also cited a 1999 News of the World interview in which Lewis was quoted as saying that she desired the director more than he had her.
Lewis, who says the quotes attributed to her were not accurate, sued for defamation.
The court did not pass judgement on Lewis’s accusation of sexual assault, but rather whether Polanski had slandered the actor in his Paris Match interview, and misused his right to freedom of expression.
Polanski, who was not present at the hearing, faces charges for the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in U.S. and has also been subject to string of sexual assault allegations by other women, which he denies.