Did Roman Polanski drug and rape a teenage British actress or is she a vengeful fantasist? As a French court decides whether the fugitive director was wrong to call Charlotte Lewis a liar for publicly claiming he assaulted her, DAVID JONES investigates

Boarding a Calais-bound ferry, we can well imagine the unknown teenage model's tangled emotions — a mixture of excitement and eagerness tinged with the fear that she might blow the chance of a lifetime.

At 16 years old, Charlotte Lewis had only ever acted in end-of-term plays at her Roman Catholic high school in Finchley, North London.

From nowhere, however, she had been summoned to a one-on-one audition with the great Roman Polanski, a filmmaker whose cinematic genius — but also his dark personal story — had brought him global attention.

The year was 1983. Casting around for a suitably young and unblemished beauty for his latest movie, Pirates, the Polish-French director had been recommended to screen-test Charlotte by a friend, who managed her London modelling agency.

With her raven hair and bewitching eyes — a product of her Chilean, Iraqi, English and Irish parentage — agency boss Karen Smith thought she would be perfect for the role of a kidnapped Spanish ingenue.

Now, with Smith as her chaperone, Charlotte was on her way (by train and ferry in those pre-Eurostar days) to meet Polanski and try to prove herself worthy of the part.

She has since claimed to have known little of his scandalous past then. Yet Polanski had first made headlines in 1969, when his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was brutally murdered by brainwashed followers of psychopathic cult leader Charles Manson.

But public sympathy evaporated eight years later. By then acclaimed for movies such as Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, he was charged with luring a 13-year-old girl to the Malibu home of his actor friend, Jack Nicholson, after an apparently innocent modelling photoshoot, then drugging and raping her.

Though the charges against him were reduced, under a plea-bargaining agreement, to a single count of unlawful intercourse with a minor, he faced a probably lengthy jail sentence had he not fled from the U.S. to France while on bail.

Arriving in Paris, Ms Lewis and Smith checked into a cheap hotel. But when, over a champagne dinner, Polanski, then 52, insisted that the young women must stay in altogether grander surroundings — the guest quarters at his stylishly modern apartment on the Avenue Montaigne — they readily agreed.

So, exactly what happened after they returned to the apartment on that December night, 41 years ago? That question is currently before a Paris court, whose president will soon deliver her verdict.

If we believe Ms Lewis, after Smith retired to bed, Polanski drugged and raped her in a chilling repeat of his assault on Samantha Gailey (now Geimer), the 13-year-old girl in California.

Now aged 90, the director, for his part, claims not to remember whether they had sex that night (after all, he had so many lovers at the time, his lawyer says). Yet of one thing he claims to be certain: if they did sleep together, it was consensual.

However, the task of the 17th chamber of the correctional court in Paris is not to deem which of these stories is true.

In a court where many historic freedom of speech trials have been staged (it was here Gustave Flaubert defended his novel Madame Bovary against obscenity charges) the president must decide whether Polanski had the right to publicly brand Lewis a 'liar' for making the rape claim. This is what he said in an interview with Paris Match magazine, in 2019.

Now a careworn woman of 56 whose acting days are gone, and who lives in a cramped studio flat above Hampstead High Street, Ms Lewis claims he did not — so she is suing Polanski, and the magazine, for libelling her.

Polanski's lawyer, Delphine Meillet, who spoke to me in her chambers near Notre-Dame cathedral, says this is a landmark case which carries huge implications for the #MeToo movement.

Hitherto, she says, claims of alleged historic sexual abuse have followed the same pattern.

When a victim — usually a woman — accuses a man of assaulting her, they are never condemned. They are usually praised for their courage in speaking out, and where the cases come to law the French and European courts rule in their favour.

On Polanski's behalf, she is arguing that the reverse should equally apply. Accused of 'the worst kind of crime', a man should be allowed to speak out in rebuttal, to defend his reputation. Of course, given his admission to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old child, Polanski's many detractors would argue he doesn't have a reputation left to defend.

Certainly, that is the view of French actress Adele Haenel, who shouted 'Bravo la pédophilie!' as she stormed out of the 2020 Cesar awards ceremony (France's equivalent of the Oscars) after Polanski was named best director for his film An Officer And A Spy.

Yet within the movie industry he retains surprisingly widespread and prominent support.

In 2009, when the U.S. authorities tried to extradite him from Switzerland to face justice for the Samantha Geimer assault, 43 prominent figures from the movie industry signed a petition for his release, including Jeremy Irons, Emma Thompson, Tilda Swinton and director Martin Scorsese.

Among sympathisers, the feeling is that it was a one-off and he has suffered enough. Indeed, his attorney, Mme Meillet says — as a woman — she is 'passionate' in his defence.

Though five more alleged victims claim Polanski sexually assaulted them when they were very young, she accuses them of jumping on the bandwagon — probably for financial gain. Or, she adds bluntly, 'to denounce a celebrity and ensure their 15 minutes of fame'.

'You discover how lies can be built on a very old truth,' she says. 'Of course, he did wrong in '77. And because he did wrong in '77, and women have lied for a long time after, there is a tiny grain of truth in there… but they are building lies on this seed of truth.'

Ms Lewis's lawyer, Benjamin Chouai, however, points to Polanski's apparent admission, in his autobiography, to having started an affair with actress Nastassja Kinski when she was 15, and brands the director's obsession with underage girls 'super-weird'.

'This may be a libel case, but my client is not suing for the money. This is purely about protecting her reputation,' he told me, adding he felt certain she was raped. Ms Lewis first went public with the allegation in 2010, when she gave a bombshell press conference in the Los Angeles office of Hollywood lawyer, Gloria Allred, who now represents several #MeToo victims.

In a statement presented to the Paris court last month, however, she went into copious detail, beginning with that first encounter with Polanski over dinner. 'I remember, Mr Polanski seemed quite disturbed by my presence, he was looking at me intensely and already imagining me playing the role of Dolores (the name of her Pirates character),' she said.

'I myself was very intimidated in his presence, although I must admit that he spoke to me in a way that seemed comfortable. He was soft and gentle.'

Back at the apartment, Smith soon retired to bed, leaving them alone in the living room. Polanski began molesting her, saying that if they were to work together he needed to 'know me intimately'.

'At 16, alone with one of the most famous filmmakers in the world, on the sofa … I was upset that I was not lucid enough to know how to react or detect what he really expected of me.'

At one point, she said, she escaped Polanski and relayed her concerns to Smith, resting in a nearby room. But her chaperone assured her she had nothing to fear, so she re-joined him. It was then he forced himself on her, she claims.

'He told me that if I wasn't mature enough to have sex with him, I was not ready to try to play the role of Dolores, and that it was time for me to grow up and accept my responsibilities. I was so petrified and nervous by what was happening that he gave me a pill to relax.'

Lewis claims Polanski abused her throughout the night. Next morning, when Smith knocked on the door, she was so disoriented she barely knew where she was.

When, two months later, she was offered the film part, she says she felt conflicted.

'Petrified with contradictory feelings, between the fear of the man and the fascination for the artist', however, she accepted —even though the movie was to be shot on location in Tunisia, and it would mean spending many months, thousands of miles from home, under the thrall of the man who had allegedly violated her.

She went with the cautious blessing of her mother, who knew nothing of the alleged rape, and was invited on to the set to allay any welfare concerns.

It is here, according to several witnesses, that Ms Lewis's story becomes perplexing.

For according to people who worked on the film she developed a crush on her mentor — observations supported by Polanski's then girlfriend and now wife, Emmanuelle Seigner.

In her court statement, Seigner recalls how the artless English girl was always 'loitering around' Polanski. Matters came to a head when the two women crossed paths one day. Ms Lewis told her to 'get lost because she had fallen in love with the director,' his wife claims.

Later, when the temperamental filmmaker stormed off the set after arguing with the production team, witnesses say his youthful prodigy demonstrated her distress by lying down in the road, in front of his car, in a vain attempt to stop him driving away.

The shooting of Pirates was completed in August 1984, but its release was delayed for two years by Polanski's legal problems. When it hit the screens, in 1986, it was panned by critics and flopped at the box office. Draping her arm around Polanski's shoulder as flashbulbs fizzed at that year's Cannes Film Festival, however, Lewis, wearing an eye-catching black outfit, looked entirely at ease in his company.

And in promotional interviews, the new starlet (by then 18 and already appearing in her second movie, alongside Eddie Murphy in The Golden Child) lavished praise on Polanski.

'I think he is one of the nicest people I've ever met. I'll never forget what he has done for me,' she told Daily Express fashion journalist Jackie Modlinger.

'He's very generous and very shy, not like they say,' she averred in the Sunday Times magazine. 'I don't trust men, full stop. But I trust him more than most men. He's not the kind who will jump on you.'

As matters transpired, Lewis's career burnt out all too quickly amid a miasma of turkey films, failed relationships and reported admissions to cocaine abuse.

By her mid-30s, her girlhood Hollywood dream was effectively over. Then why, decades later, would she invent a rape claim?

Thumbing through her weighty case files, Mme Meillet produces the documents for Eve HD Productions, a company set up by Ms Lewis and a former friend, Bronwyn Bunt-Brown in March 2010 — just a few weeks before she publicly denounced Polanski.

It was to be the vehicle for a film with the working title of Charlotte's Adventures in Wonderland. In the pitch to potential investors, Ms Lewis promised to reminisce 'with her good friend Melanie Sykes about her lives and loves during the 20-plus years she spent in Hollywood'.

Using her 'acerbic wit' and 'entertaining dialogue', she would spill the secrets of her declared affairs with Charlie Sheen, Russell Crowe, Robert De Niro, and Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash, among others.

Whether the well-known TV presenter Ms Sykes knew anything about this project, which never came to fruition, we don't know.

However, Mme Meillet offers it as possible motive for Lewis's belated accusation, suggesting that, as she was no longer famous, she was courting publicity to launch her Wonderland film.

Ms Bunt-Brown, a Surrey- based American, dismisses this notion. The idea to return Ms Lewis to the spotlight had been all hers, she told me, and had quickly fizzled out. Moreover, Ms Lewis had privately confided Polanski's assault to her many months before she made the claim openly.

'She told me all the details,' she says. 'She remembered the sound of the shutters (on Polanski's apartment windows) being closed — she felt as though she was being shut into a cage.

'To this day, when she hears that sound, it brings it all back. And she still recalls the scent of the candles that were burning that night. She felt increasingly powerless, that she had to comply, so she just closed her eyes until it was over. I absolutely believe her.'

Soon after telling her story, Ms Bunt-Brown says, Ms Lewis was so traumatised that she understandably 'went off the rails' again, causing their friendship to end.

Ms Lewis's old schoolfriend, Angela Ryan, is also convinced she is telling the truth.

In her court statement, she recalls how she returned home with her girlish dreams in pieces.

As she poured out her story, Ms Ryan became 'outraged'. But the budding actress dared not speak publicly then for fear of wrecking her fledging career, so she 'shut down'.

Further tangling the story are two contradictory statements given by Karen Smith, the only on-the-spot witness.

In 2016, she made a sworn declaration saying Lewis had told her Polanski had 'forced himself on her', the morning after, but she has since retracted this.

Coincidentally, the court verdict is due on May 14 — the day before the release of Polanski's latest film, The Palace, a critically lambasted satire that sees John Cleese, as tycoon Arthur William Dallas III, expire beneath his overweight wife as they have sex.

Much will depend on the credence the judge gives to Ms Lewis's long-ago newspaper interviews — yellowing paper cuttings retrieved from Fleet Street archives by Polanski's legal team.

Dozens of these were exhibited in court, but Polanski's lawyers drew special attention to one racy piece, published across three pages of the News of the World in 1999, when Ms Lewis was in her 30s and down on her luck.

In this article — which Polanski showed to the Paris Match writer when branding her a liar — she reportedly admitted to having had a full-blown affair with the director.

She is also said to have confessed that, at 14, she was already a 'wild child' who sold sex to wealthy men she picked up at London clubs.

Ms Lewis's lawyer, Benjamin Chouai, claims this lurid interview was fabricated.

However, the retired reporter who wrote it, respected newsman Stuart White, vehemently stands by his story and appeared in court to defend his own unblemished reputation.

Claiming Ms Lewis was paid £30,000 for the exclusive, he points out that, had the piece been invented, she could have sued the paper for a vast sum, but had never previously complained.

Polanski and Ms Lewis now live in parallel universes.

In Hampstead, she cuts a rather sorry figure, by various accounts, regaling coffee shop customers — who have no idea who she is —with stories of her glittering past, sometimes related in a faux American accent.

Acquaintances hold up her downfall as a possible signal that she is suffering from the long-term psychological effects of sexual abuse.

Polanski still lives, with his wife, in the apartment at the centre of this sordid drama. Approaching his 91st birthday, he remains 'amazingly' fit, says his lawyer.

When he isn't skiing in the Alps, he works in an office where he displays the Oscar he won for The Pianist.

Many will find it impossible to accept the word of a man with such an unsavoury past. But does that appalling act of depravity in the U.S. in 1977, committed, so he contends, when moral standards were very different, remove his right to refute every other accusation?

At a time when the #MeToo crusade is in ferment and fingers of historic blame are being pointed with alarming regularity, the court's decision will be keenly awaited.