Replacing Special Characters in Strings

I've seen a lot of Q&A here on SO related to this question. And I have used a few examples but something just isn't working:

def input = 'now is thé timé'
println Normalizer.normalize(input, Normalizer.Form.NFD).replaceAll(/[^A-z0-9 ]/, "").replaceAll(/ +/, "-")

The output of the above is

now-is-th-tim

If I do the following:

String input = 'now is th\u00E9 tim\u00E9'
println Normalizer.normalize(input, Normalizer.Form.NFD).replaceAll(/[^A-z0-9 ]/, "").replaceAll(/ +/, "-")

I get

now-is-the-time

which is what I want. I even tried the following:

def input = groovy.json.StringEscapeUtils.escapeJavaScript('now is thé timé')
println Normalizer.normalize(input, Normalizer.Form.NFD).replaceAll(/[^A-z0-9 ]/, "").replaceAll(/ +/, "-")

but I get

now-is-th\u221A\u00A9-tim\u221A\u00A9

Any suggestions?

UPDATE: Based on the comments, I tried the following:

import java.text.Normalizer

def input = new File('file.txt').text
def results = Normalizer.normalize(input, Normalizer.Form.NFD).replaceAll(/[^A-z0-9 ]/, "")
    .replaceAll(/ +/, "-")
println results

file.txt contains the text I had placed in the string. And that is working as expected. So there is something going on with the encoding of the string definition in groovy.