Demonstrators in Paris blocked the French debut of Roman Polanski’s new movie, An Officer and a Spy, after a new rape allegation against the director

A group of about 40 activists blocked the screening of the French premiere of Polanski’s J’accuse (An Officer and a Spy) at a cinema in Rue Champollion, although the film was screened elsewhere in Paris.

“The cancellation of this screening is not a victory. Victory will be when the impunity for rapists ends,” Chloe Madesta, one of the activists, told France Info Radio.

Polanski is launching his new film in France just days after the French actor Valentine Monnier, in an open letter to the daily paper Le Parisien, accused Polanski, now 86, of having raped her in 1975, when she was 18 years old, during a ski holiday in Gstaad, Switzerland. Polanski has denied the accusation.

Monnier is one of several women who have publicly accused Polanski of sexual assault. Polanski has repeatedly denied all accusations against him.

Accusations against Polanski predate the Hollywood film mogul Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal in 2017, but Polanski’s history came under renewed scrutiny as the #MeToo movement against sexual abuse and harassment grew in the wake of the Weinstein allegations.

Polanski fled the United States in 1978 after pleading guilty in 1977 to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles.

In October 2017, protesters disrupted the opening of a retrospective of Polanski’s work in Paris after new rape accusations against the director.

Last year, Polanski was expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In a production note for his new film – about Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French army officer who in 1894 was falsely accused of spying and convicted of treason – Polanski has compared his problems with the law and the persecution he says he has suffered with the struggles of Dreyfus.

Dreyfus’s conviction was seen as being motivated by antisemitism and the case deeply split France. He was eventually exonerated, after an annulment of the original judgment and a second conviction.

“It is absolutely indecent to make a parallel between Dreyfus’s story of denial of justice and Polanski’s story. Polanski has spent his life fleeing from justice,” Madesta said.

“We call on all theatres not to show this film and on film lovers not to see it,” she added.

In August, Polanski stayed away from the premiere of An Officer and a Spy at the Venice film festival.

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