At the start of his film "J'accuse", director Roman Polanski faces new allegations of rape in France. The first public screenings of the historical drama have been accompanied by protests. Now France's Minister of Culture Franck Riester has joined in the debate: "Genius is no guarantee of impunity," he said in Paris in a debate on equal rights in the film, without naming the Polish-French director by name. "Talent is not a mitigating factor," Riester explained. At the same time he warned against an "opinion tribunal".
In Polanski's new film, which will be released in Germany in February under the title "Intrigue" in the cinemas, it is about the Dreyfus affair: the case of the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, who was wrongly convicted in France in 1894 for treason. Some critics accuse the Holocaust survivor Polanski of wanting to stylize itself with the film itself the victim of an intrigue.
A former model had accused Polanski, who lives in France, of raping her at his home in Switzerland before filming in 1975. Polanski, who won the Oscar for "The Pianist" in 2003, rejects the allegations. The Oscar Academy had ruled him out for "sexual misconduct" in the # MeToo debate in 2018.
86-year-old Polanski had sex with 13-year-old Samantha Geimer in the US in 1977. A year later, he fled the US, where he is still facing a lawsuit for the rape of a minor.