Roman Polanski Accused of 1975 Rape (Published 2019)
- ️Sat Nov 09 2019
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A French photographer said the director hit her and assaulted her when she was 18. She is the sixth woman to publicly accuse him of sexual abuse.
Nov. 9, 2019
PARIS — A French photographer has accused the director Roman Polanski of violently raping her in 1975 in his ski chalet in Switzerland when she was 18, adding to the list of several women who have publicly accused Mr. Polanski of sexually abusing them as teenagers.
The director, who is preparing to release a film on Wednesday dealing with themes of injustice, “firmly denied” the latest accusation, his lawyer said.
In a letter published online Friday by the French newspaper Le Parisien, the photographer, Valentine Monnier, 62, said she was breaking 44 years of silence after a recent interview by Mr. Polanski. In it, the director suggested that he was a victim of persecution, like the main subject of his new film, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish military officer wrongly convicted of treason in what remains France’s most notorious miscarriage of justice.
“Is it credible to hear somebody say, ‘I accuse’ when they have branded you and forbidden you, the victim, to accuse him?” Ms. Monnier said in an interview published by the same newspaper.
A lawyer for Mr. Polanski, Hervé Temime, said on Saturday: “For 45 years, these accusations have never been reported to judicial authorities. I strongly deplore their publication a few days before the release of his film.”
Ms. Monnier told Le Parisien that she went to Mr. Polanski’s chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland, in the winter of 1975 with friends, but had not known him personally. When the group went skiing, she said, he propositioned her in vulgar terms while they were seated together on a ski lift, and she declined.