The US civil trial against Roman Polański for alleged rape, scheduled for next year, has been canceled. The director must appear in court again on Wednesday in another case in Paris. A return to the US remains unlikely for Roman Polański.
As the Oscar winner’s lawyer, Alexander Rufus-Isaacs, said in an email on Tuesday, the case “was settled over the summer to the mutual satisfaction of the parties and has now been formally canceled.”
Agreement “conditional”
According to court documents filed in California in July, a settlement was reached “conditionally.” The alleged victim’s attorney, Gloria Allred, said in an email late Tuesday that “the parties have reached an agreement to their mutual satisfaction.”
The alleged victim sued Polański last year. The woman accuses the filmmaker of taking her out to dinner at a Los Angeles restaurant in 1973, when she was a minor. He allegedly gave her tequila there and, when she became dizzy, drove her to his house and raped her there.
Paris: accusation of defamation
Polański is due to appear in court again on Wednesday in another case. The trial in Paris concerns accusations of defamation. Polański was acquitted at first instance, while British actress Charlotte Lewis appealed.
Lewis accuses Polański of wrongly accusing her of lying. Polański accused Lewis of “vile lies” in a 2019 interview. He had pointed out that the actress had boasted in a tabloid that she had seduced the director.
Lewis stated at trial that he had been misquoted. She had previously publicly accused Polański of sexually abusing her in the 1980s, when she was 16 and appeared in Polański’s film “Pirates.” She decided not to press charges because she thought the case had expired.
Escape in 1978
Over the years, several women have made serious accusations against Roman Polański: in 2019, a French photographer accused Polański of abusing and raping her in 1975, when she was 18 years old. In 2017, a former German actress came forward and said she was raped by the filmmaker at the age of 15 in the 1970s.
Director Roman Polański has been away from the US for almost forty years. Due to a sex crime committed in 1977, the now 90-year-old Oscar-winning Polish-French filmmaker faces a prison sentence when he returns to the US. A California court rejected the termination of the abuse proceedings against Polański in 2017. The responsible judge did not want to give the director any guarantee that he would be spared further imprisonment upon his return. It insisted that Polański had to appear in person for the sentencing, which posed a significant risk to him.
Since fleeing the United States in 1978, Polański has had his main residence in Paris. The director strictly avoids traveling to countries where he would be extradited to the US. The center of his life remains Paris, where, as a French citizen, he is protected from prosecution by the American judiciary. Polański has not returned to the US since.
Source: Krone
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