On Monday, July 12, a Swiss court decided not to extradite director Roman Polanski to the United States, who is accused of drinking champagne, drugging him with the sedative Quaalude, forcing him to perform oral sex, raping and sodomizing 8- year-old Samantha Gamer.
Polanski was arrested in America on March 11, 1977, and before a grand jury indicted him for rape with the use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious act on a girl under the age of fourteen and giving prohibited substances to minors.
On the advice of a lawyer, he agreed to plead guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse, which is synonymous with rape under California law, so that the other five counts of the indictment would be dismissed.
Judge Lawrence Rittenband obtained an expert psychiatric opinion that he should not be sentenced to prison and sent him to Chino State Prison for 90 days of psychiatric observation. After 42 days of observation and psychiatric evaluation, he was released, but he learned through his lawyer that the judge believed that prison and deportation were imminent, so on February 1, 1978, he fled to France, practically a few hours before he would be sentenced.
Since he fled the US court, all counts of the original indictment against Polanski were reinstated. As a French citizen, however, he was protected from extradition and rarely left France, avoiding countries from which he could be extradited.
Meanwhile, Samantha Gamer sued Polanski in 1988 for sexual assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress and seduction. Polanski settled with Samantha Gamer in 1993, but as of August 1996 he still owed her $604.416. Geimerova and her lawyers later confirmed that the contract had been fulfilled.
In 1997, Gamer publicly forgave Polanski and filed a formal request with the Los Angeles Police Department to drop the charges against him. In 2003, she wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times pleading for Polanski to be allowed to return home. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner was charmed by her gesture.
However, when Polanski was on his way to Zurich to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, Swiss police detained him at the Zurich airport on September 26, 2009 based on a 2005 US warrant.
He spent two months in a Swiss prison, and on December 4, 2009, he was placed under house arrest at his residence in Gstaad, wearing a special bracelet that controls his movements. He posted $4,5 million bail.
On January 22, 2010, California Supreme Court Justice Peter Espinoza ruled that Polanski must return to America for trial. The judge who started the case has died.
Swiss authorities asked the US Department of Justice for the original settlement file between Judge Rittenband and Polanski, but in May 2010 their request was denied.
It is as if something dark spilled from his films into the life of the important director Roman Polanski, educated in Łódź, one of whose first short films from 1959 is entitled Fallen angel.
He is surrounded by tragedies. His mother died in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, and Polanski escaped this fate by escaping from the Krakow ghetto. He spent the war years in exile throughout Europe. He left Poland in 1961, lived in Paris for several years, moved to Britain, and then to America.
During the filming Fearless vampire hunters he met the American actress Sharon Tate, born in Dallas, Texas, with whom he entered into a love relationship, and then married on January 25, 1968 in London. In 1969, a pregnant Sharon Tate was massacred at Roman Polanski's house in Benedict Canyon above Los Angeles by the shaggy serial killer Charles Manson, who was born in 1934 as the child of a 16-year-old prostitute, and is currently serving a life sentence for 9 monstrous murders, and it is suspected that he committed more than 35 crimes with his "family". The walls of that house were written in blood, which was greeted with horror by the heated public at the time.
In 2004, Polanski sued Vanity Fair magazine for defamation and was awarded £50.000 after the newspaper reported that on the way to Sharon's funeral, Roman had sexually assaulted a certain young model, claiming that he could make her the next Sharon Tate. In the process, the court allowed Roman Polanski to testify via video link, which was the first time this happened in Great Britain.
After the death of Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski returned to Europe, staying mostly in Paris and Gstaad, and after a long break in England, he directed the film Macbeth (Macbeth 1971), for which one critic wrote that corpses and murders are so dominant in it that it is difficult pay attention to poetry.
Roman Polanski is an important director of the late 1966th century who breaks clichés with his nihilism. His Cul-de-Sac (1963) is a tragicomedy inspired by avant-garde Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party. He was nominated for the first time, and in XNUMX he won the Oscar for the best film in a foreign language for Knife in the water from 1962, filled with pessimism about human relationships and jealousy. His movie Rosemary's baby from 1968, for which he won an Oscar, caused a moral earthquake at the time. His movie Chinatown (1974) was nominated for 11 Oscars. He was nominated five times for an Oscar and received an award for directing the film Pianist, which presents a biography of the Polish-Jewish musician Władysław Szpilman. He won two Bafta awards, four Caesars, a Golden Globe, a Golden Palm...
His extradition has been the subject of a dispute between European and American filmmakers, intellectuals, politicians, victims and human rights groups. Those who defend him argue that a lot of time has passed and that this important artist has suffered enough, while those who condemn him argue that his talent and fame have overshadowed the seriousness of the accusations against him.
