Who is Roman Polanski...

...Roman Polański is a French-Polish film director, producer, writer, and actor. His Polish-Jewish parents moved the family back from Paris to Kraków in 1937. Two years later, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany starting World War II and the Polanskis found themselves trapped in the Kraków Ghetto.

...In a letter published online Friday by the French newspaper Le Parisien, the photographer, Valentine Monnier, 62, said she was breaking 44 years of silence after a recent interview by Mr. Polanski. In it, the director suggested that he was a victim of persecution, like the main subject of his new film, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish military officer wrongly convicted of treason in what remains France’s most notorious miscarriage of justice.

“Is it credible to hear somebody say, ‘I accuse’ when they have branded you and forbidden you, the victim, to accuse him?” Ms. Monnier said in an interview published by the same newspaper.

...A lawyer for Mr. Polanski, Hervé Temime, said on Saturday: “For 45 years, these accusations have never been reported to judicial authorities. I strongly deplore their publication a few days before the release of his film.”

Ms. Monnier told Le Parisien that she went to Mr. Polanski’s chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland, in the winter of 1975 with friends, but had not known him personally. When the group went skiing, she said, he propositioned her in vulgar terms while they were seated together on a ski lift, and she declined.

...Mr. Polanski later apologized to her in tears, she said.

Ms. Monnier said she wanted to speak publicly in order to bring an end to “idolizing the guilty ones.”

Mr. Polanski has lived in France since 1978, when he fled the United States before sentencing after pleading guilty to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl.

Because the statute of limitations for rape is 20 years in France, her accusation cannot lead to an investigation or prosecution. “I denounce this crime knowing that there can’t be any punishment, in an attempt to end exceptions, impunity,” she said in Le Parisien.

In an email to The New York Times on Saturday, Ms. Monnier declined to comment further.

...In 2017, a German former actress, Renate Langer, accused Mr. Polanski of raping her in 1972, when she was 15, also in his Gstaad chalet. Swiss prosecutors declined to pursue a rape investigation in that case, citing statute of limitations laws.

Mr. Polanski has also been accused of sexual abuse by the British actress Charlotte Lewis, who said in 2010 that the director abused her in 1983, when she was 16; and by a woman publicly identified only as Robin, who in 2017 said that he had “sexually victimized” her in 1973, when she was 16.

Also in 2017, an artist, Marianne Barnard, accused Mr. Polanski of molesting her in 1975, when she was 10. The director said at the time that he rejected the “unfounded allegations.”

He remains wanted in the United States over the case involving the 13-year-old, Samantha Geimer, but France does not extradite its citizens. Judges have denied multiple requests from the director to drop the decades-old case.

Feminist groups in France have regularly staged protests against Mr. Polanski, including outside a retrospective of his career at the prestigious Cinémathèque in October 2017.

...Although Ms. Monnier first spoke publicly on Friday, she had long made her story known to those close to her, she told Le Parisien. She said she also written about her accusation to France’s first lady, Brigitte Macron, to the culture minister and to the junior minister for gender equality, Marlène Schiappa, in 2018.

Ms. Schiappa, in turn, wrote a letter to Ms. Monnier in March of that year, which The New York Times has obtained.

In the letter, she praised Ms. Monnier for “breaking a 42-year-old silence,” and said she empathized with her pain, adding, “I understand your indignation.”