Roman Polanski faces new rape accusation from former actress

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Roman Polanski has been accused by a fourth woman of raping her while she was minor, prompting Swiss police to launch an investigation into the Oscar winning director

Former German actress Renate Langer, 61, claims he sexually assaulted her at his mountain chalet in Gstaad in 1972, when she was 15 years old.

She is the fourth woman to publicly accuse the 84-year-old French-Polish director of rape when they were minor.

A lawyer for Polanski said his client was aware of the allegation and dismissed the claim as an "absurd" attempt to gain public attention.

The communications chief of St Gallen's police confirmed they were investigating the claim.

But prosecutors were considering whether it was possible to bring charges against Polanski for a crime that allegedly took place 45 years ago.

Switzerland has abolished its statute of limitations on child sex abuse cases, although the law limits prosecution in cases that happened many years ago.

Ms Langer said she had not previously reported the alleged crime to the police and did not confide in friends and family at the time out of concern for her parents.

Her father died this summer, two years after her mother's death. She said she told a boyfriend some years later.

“My mother would have had a heart attack,” she told The New York Times, which first reported the claim. “I felt ashamed and embarrassed and lost and solo.”

Ms Langer said she went to Gstaad because Polanski had shown an interest in casting her in a film. She was working as a model in Munich at the time.

She told the newspaper that Polanski raped her in a bedroom at his home.

Polanski has been a fugitive from the US since 1978, when he fled to France after pleading guilty to having unlawful sex with a minor in California.

His victim, Samantha Geimer, was 13 at the time.

The woman asked a judge in June to drop the case against Polanski, after 40 years, saying doing so "would finally bring this matter to a close as an act of mercy to myself and my family".

But Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Scott Gordon rejected the motion, saying stating there was insufficient reason for reconsideration.

Polanski was in Switzerland this week with his wife, French actress Emmanuelle Seigner.

The pair attended a screening of his new movie, the French-language thriller Based On A True Story at the Zurich Film Festival.

Agencies contributed to this report