While the #MeToo movement that rocked Hollywood was slower to take hold in France, there has been a dam-burst of allegations since.

Roman Polanski: Fugitive

The director of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Pianist” has faced a number of sex assault allegations since fleeing to France from Los Angeles in 1978 after admitting to the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl.

The United States has tried on several occasions to extradite the Oscar winner, who is a dual French-Polish national.

In 2019 French photographer Valentine Monnier accused Polanski of raping her in his Swiss chalet in 1975 when she was an 18-year-old actress, saying he tried to give her a pill as he beat her “into submission”. Polanski denies her claim.

Luc Besson: Nine accusers

Luc Besson – once France’s most powerful movie mogul – was embroiled in two rape investigations sparked by his former girlfriend, Dutch-Belgian actress Sand Van Roy, who accused him of raping her over a two-year period.

But the case was closed by a Paris magistrate in December.

Van Roy is one of nine women who have said they were assaulted or harassed by the powerful director and producer, maker of “Nikita” and “The Fifth Element”. But Besson strongly denies the accusations, dismissing Van Roy as a “fantasist”.

Adele Haenel: Harassed at 12

Adele Haenel, one of the country’s most acclaimed actresses, is credited with helping break an omerta in the French film industry by saying she was sexually harassed as a 12-year-old by the director of her first film.

Paris prosecutors opened an investigation in 2019 into the claims.

Haenel, now 32, says Christophe Ruggia subjected her to “constant sexual harassment” from the age of 12 to 15, including “forced kisses on the neck” and touching during a three-year spell working on the 2002 film, “The Devils”.

Ruggia denied sexual harassment but was expelled from the French Society of Film Directors after admitting that his “adulation” for the actress could have proved distressing.

Gabriel Matzneff: Underage conquests

Celebrated essayist Gabriel Matzneff is facing trial after publisher Vanessa Springora – one of his many underage lovers – detailed their relationship three decades ago in a ground-breaking memoir called “Consent”.

The bestseller, now being made into a film, details the hold he had over her when she was 14.

Matzneff, now 85, never made a secret of his preference for adolescent girls and boys but still got a special state pension as well as winning one of the country’s top literary awards in 2013.

He wrote about his paedophile sex trips to Asia and published a notorious essay in the 1970s in defence of sex with children, “The Under 16s”, in which he recounted his “conquests”.