LUCIDMEDIA

Roman Polanski: The Neverending Law & Order Episode

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Tuesday, 29 September 2009 12:53

The arrest of Academy Award winning filmmaker Roman Polanski in Switzerland Saturday was nearly 32 years in the making. Yet somehow it still came as a great surprise as the man behind Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist was picked up at Zurich airport while on his way to accept a lifetime achievement prize at the local film festival. Polanski now faces the possibility of being extradited to the United States and finally facing the court he ran from more than three decades ago, while lawyers and observes split their questions between “Why now?” and “What took you so long?”

Our story begins in 1977, when a then 44-year-old Polanski was accused of having an inappropriate relationship with the then 13-year-old Samantha Gailey, whom he was photographing for an issue of Vogue that he was guest editing. Two photo sessions later, and the girl accused Polanski of performing various sexual acts on her after giving her a combination of champagne and sedatives. Polanski was charged with rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor. In a plea bargain he pled guilty to the sole charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, but in February 1978, he left for England and then to France, and never returned to the U.S.

As a policy, France can decide whether or not it wants to deport its own citizens in their extradition agreement with the U.S., so as a French citizen Polanski’s been rather secure under their protection. But being what’s a basically a wanted man never forced the filmmaker into hiding; he continued working, won the Best Director Oscar in 2003 for The Pianist, and in 1989 remarried and had two children with French actress Emmanuelle Seigner. He’s still travelled on a limited basis to countries like Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, even Switzerland, but he was always careful not to travel anywhere there was a likelihood of being arrested and put up for extradition. All that changed Saturday night though.

There has been a movement as of late, spurned mostly by the screening of a documentary called Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired at 2008’s Sundance, to reopen the Polanski case and dismiss it. Last December, Polanski’s American lawyers petitioned California Judge David S. Wesley to dismiss all charges in the case on grounds that there was professional and judicial misconduct in the original trial by Judge Laurence J. Rittenband now deceased; many of these charges against Rittenband were raised in Wanted and Desired. In January though, Judge Peter Espinoza while concurring that there may have been something to those charges, he refused to rule on the matter unless Polanski himself made an appearance in court, which never happened.

Then, earlier this year, the alleged victim Samantha Gailey, now Samantha Geimer, petitioned the court on her own to have the charges against Polanski dropped. "I am no longer a 13-year-old child,” she said in her declaration. “I have dealt with the difficulties of being a victim, have surmounted and surpassed them with one exception. Every time this case is brought to the attention of the Court, great focus is made of me, my family, my mother and others. That attention is not pleasant to experience and is not worth maintaining over some irrelevant legal nicety, the continuation of the case.”

Now it seems that Polanski’s Swiss arrest may have been because of renewed heat generated about the case by the director’s own attorneys, said an article in Monday’s Los Angeles Times. Small mentions in two recent court filings seemed to accuse the Los Angeles District Attorneys’ Office of not taking the extradition of Polanski seriously. “The district attorney’s office, in the 30 years since Mr. Polanski left the jurisdiction, has not once sought to have him extradited. If it had, there would have been a hearing regarding misconduct in this case,” wrote the attorneys, Chad Hummel, Douglas Dalton and Bart Dalton, in a July 7 filing.

Further, Polanski’s lawyers inferred that the DA’s office was motivated to not pursue the filmmaker and return him to the U.S. and thus avoid any inquiry into accusations of judicial misconduct against them. Whether true or not, unnamed sources told the LA Times that the allegations spurned DA’s to look for a way to get Polanski in custody, and his trip to Switzerland proved as apt as any. Adding to the confusion over Polanski’s sudden arrest though is that this was not his first trip to the country, in fact, Polanski, an avid skier, owns a house in Switzerland.

Adding to the pre-existing media whirlwind is that Polanski’s arrest seems to be turning into something of a minor international incident. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told France-Inter radio that he and Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski had been in touch with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to advocate on the director’s behalf that he should be set free on bail. (Presumably, Clinton’s plate is already full with short-range missile tests in Iran she has to deal with.) Another French official, Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand, told the French media that, "In the same way that there is a generous America that we like, there is also a scary America that has just shown its face."

Many have rallied to the filmmaker’s defense since word came down of Polanski’s arrest, not just Frech bureaucrats, but a wide assortment of people in the arts across Europe. Many see a conspiracy afoot, a quid pro quo if you will: Polanski’s arrest in exchange for U.S. authorities backing off pressure on Swiss Banks following the UBS tax evasion case. “There was a valid arrest request and we knew when he was coming. That’s why he was taken into custody,” Swiss Justice spokesman Guido Balmer told The Associated Press. “There is no link with any other issues.”

Whatever the reason, whatever the results, this is just the latest chapter in a decades long case that seems unable to find resolution. Sure, the court may have been dirty in the case of Polanski’s trial, but does that excuse his 30-plus-year runner, even if the guy wasn’t exactly living like Richard Kimble? It’s worth pointing out that Polanski’s sentence was 90 days of psychological observation in prison, 45 days of which he served before his French “vacation.” Even at that, the average sentence for statutory rape at the time was 37 months, or one-tenth of Polanski’s self-imposed European exile. Whatever your feelings on Polanski, whatever the courts work out between themselves, when even the alleged victim is fed up enough to call for the charges to be dropped (though she still acknowledges what he did was wrong), you know it’s long past due to find a resolution. Despite the hyperbole and legal posturing, at this point, the only words many people want to hear in this matter is “Case Closed.”