Director Roman Polanski has settled a lawsuit over the alleged rape of a minor in 1973, avoiding a trial scheduled for 2025 in the United States.

The lawsuit was filed anonymously in 2023, during a brief period when California law extended the statute of limitations on sexual assault cases. The lawsuit alleged that the Chinatown director took the plaintiff and invited Jane Doe to dinner even though she knew she was a minor. He then gave her tequila at his home and bought her more drinks at the restaurant.

Jane Doe claimed in the lawsuit that she became ill and ran to the bathroom. As she ran out of the restaurant to get some air, Polanski took her back to his house. She claims Polanski raped her the next morning, “causing her tremendous physical and emotional pain and suffering.”

Doe made the claims public in 2017 but did not file her lawsuit until several years later. Polanski has denied the claims in the lawsuit, which was dismissed after the settlement.

Polanski has not been in the United States since the late 1970s, when he fled the country after pleading guilty to having unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor named Samantha Geimer. In recent years, several other women have accused Polanski of sexual assault.

Polanski was expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2018 along with Bill Cosby over the group that puts on the Oscars' involvement with the #MeToo movement. Polanski has described this reckoning as “mass hysteria… like the French Revolution or the Bartholomew Massacre in France.”