Do we like Roman Polanski?
Our score: 0 out of 10. He pleaded guilty in 1977 to unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl and has stayed out of reach of that case for decades.
Polanski is one of the big names of European cinema. He won the best director Oscar in 2003 for The Pianist but didn't travel to the US to collect it, and his most recent big hit in France was An Officer and a Spy. He's a director who could still get a film made, even after the world changed around him.
The case that defines him goes back to 1977. He pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles, was held for about six weeks, then left the US fearing the plea deal would be overturned and a long sentence would follow. He has not returned, and in 2017 a Los Angeles judge refused to end the case even though the woman at the centre of it asked the court to close it.
Since then the allegations have kept coming, and he denies them. A civil suit filed in 2023 alleged he sexually assaulted a teenager in 1973. It was settled and dismissed in 2024, with his lawyer saying he had always denied wrongdoing. British actor Charlotte Lewis alleged he abused her in 1983 when she was 16, and when he called that a “heinous lie” she sued him for defamation.
A Paris court acquitted him of defaming Lewis in May 2024 and an appeals court upheld that in December. Both rulings were about defamation only, not whether her allegation is true, and her lawyer called the appeal decision “very questionable”. That's a legal win on free speech, not a finding on what happened.
On the harm check, he told the Polish edition of Newsweek in 2018 that #MeToo was “mass hysteria”, days before the Academy expelled him. In a 2019 Paris Match interview he said the media were trying to make him a monster, and he denied a separate allegation from a French photographer, calling her account aberrant. Nothing turned up on his views about trans people, vaccines or the climate, so that's a gap in the record, not a clean bill.
Do we know of real good? Honestly, only the work: the Oscar, the Césars and a hit film in France. The 2022 Variety piece on his career reported a cooling in his French support. We found no charity or causes he's put his name to, and that's honestly the whole list.