THE former model at the heart of the Roman Polanski libel case has broken her silence to say that the film director never even spoke to her, much less “slid his hand inside her thigh” on his way to his wife’s funeral, as alleged by Vanity Fair.

Beatte Telle, 59, spoke out for the first time in 36 years after a British court awarded Polanksi £50,000 last week. The director, who said he had been “monstrously libelled for the sake of a lurid anecdote”, gave evidence from Paris via video link. Outstanding charges of statutory rape meant that he could be deported to America if he had come to London.

Speaking from Oslo, Telle said she was “pleased for him. I’m smiling”. She recalled the meal at Elaine’s restaurant with her former lover, Ed Perlman, that was described in the article but said: “Roman Polanski came over to the table when I was eating and it was as if he tried to say something but he didn’t ... He just stared at me for ages.”

Telle, who first went to America to work in a bank, says she did not even recognise the director, and Perlman had to tell her who Polanski was after they had left the restaurant.

Photographs of the young model show an uncanny resemblance to Polanski’s dead wife, Sharon Tate, who had been mutilated and murdered just days earlier by the Charles Manson family.

The women had the same willowy figure, easy smiles and long blonde hair, but Telle emphasises: “He didn’t touch me, he just didn’t. I’m so happy.

“The lawyers (for Condé Nast) wrote to me several times, but I just ignored them. At one point I wrote and said I was coming to London but I didn’t. I just wanted to put them off.

“Ed wrote to me, too. He wrote all about that night, saying, ‘Do you remember how Polanski came up to you? How he said this and he said that’.

“I just thought, ‘If you remember so much about it then you talk about it in court.' It isn’t how I remember it.”

Telle, who was once one of the most sought-after models in New York, is now living with her sick mother in a one-bedroom flat with a shared bathroom.

She insists that she is still in demand, although in an interview with the Mail on Sunday she admitted: “I know I need a little work done, a nip and tuck here, lose a few pounds, have some Restylane injected, but I’ll do that and get back working again. Just now I need to look after my mother, who has had an operation.”

Efforts to launch her own fragrance and range of beauty products five years ago appear to have failed. Now the suburbs of the Norwegian capital seem like a long way from the fashionable circles of Elaine’s, where the rich and famous satisfied their appetites.

“I was considered a beauty, you know,” said Telle, whose face is still arresting although the skin under her chin is sagging and veins beginning to show on her arms.

“But Polanski was never fresh with me. I never spoke to him that night and I never saw him again.”

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