Director Roman Polanski has settled a lawsuit over an alleged rape of a minor in 1973, avoiding a trial in the United States that was scheduled for 2025.
The lawsuit was filed anonymously in 2023 during a brief period when California law expanded the statute of limitations around sexual assault. The lawsuit alleged that the Chinatown director took the plaintiff invited Jane Doe to dinner knowing she was a minor. He then gave her tequila at his home and bought her more drinks at the restaurant.
Jane Doe claimed in the lawsuit that she became ill and ran to the restroom. When she ran out of the restaurant for air, she says Polanski took her back to his house. She claims Polanski raped her the following morning "causing her tremendous physical and emotional pain and suffering."
Doe went public with the claims in 2017, but did not file her lawsuit until several years later. Polanski has denied the claims in the lawsuit, which has been dismissed following the settlement.
Polanski has not been to the United States since the late 1970s, when he fled the country after pleading guilty to having unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor named Samantha Geimer. In recent years, several more women have accused Polanski of sexual assault.
Polanski was expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2018, alongside Bill Cosby, as the group that runs the Oscars grappled with the #MeToo movement. Polanski has called that reckoning a "mass hysteria...like the French Revolution or the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in France."
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