“It was a clumsy sentence. “The actress Emmanuelle Seigner apologized on Saturday, in the program” What time! (France 2), a week after her controversial statement on the rape charges against her husband, Roman Polanski. “All the women wanted to sleep with him, he didn’t need to rape anyone,” she said last Sunday on TF1.
“I expressed myself badly, I apologize,” she said this Saturday, facing journalist Léa Salamé. And the 56-year-old actress continues: “What I wanted to say is that when I met him in 1985, he was extremely courted by a lot of women, a lot of young girls, and for me, this wasn’t always fun. He never gave me reason to be jealous, but it wasn’t always pleasant. »
The France 2 journalist then reminded him that we were not talking about “a seducer, but accusations of rape and sexual assault”. “And so to say my husband, all women wanted to sleep with him, that’s why he’s not a rapist, we know very well that this is not an argument,” she added. “Of course,” agreed Emmanuelle Seigner.
“The relationship to age has also changed a lot”
In an interview broadcast last Sunday on the program “Seven to Eight”, and for the first time, the wife of director Roman Polanski wanted to publicly defend her husband, accused of several rapes. “All the young girls wanted to sleep with him. It was crazy stuff. What was crazy. He was 52 but he looked like he was 30, he was a great director so he was hugely appealing, and I don’t think he needed to rape anyone,” she said.
Roman Polanski is accused of drugging and raping Samantha Gailey, 13 at the time, in Los Angeles in 1977. “Thirteen is young of course, but it was a very permissive time. She was three weeks away from her 14th birthday,” Emmanuelle Seigner argued on October 16. “The relationship to age has also changed a lot. At the time, we praised the lolita, we celebrated it. »
For this case, Polanski spent 42 days in prison in the United States before flying to Paris when a judge seemed about to renege on the agreement reached with the prosecutor to sentence him to several decades. from prison. The director, 89 years old today, is still the subject of an international arrest warrant and has on several occasions risked being extradited.
In 2010, British actress Charlotte Lewis, now 55, accused the filmmaker of raping her in 1982, when she was 16. Polanski was accused of rape by six other women, including the Frenchwoman Valentine Monnier who confided in Parisian in 2019, but all denounced the prescribed facts. The director has always disputed these accusations.