[Reuters]Roman Polanski arrested in Switzerland 31 years after fleeing trial

I guess the R Kelly rules are in effect
You got enough money
you can stave off prosecution long enough
. .
. .
. .
You get to get off.

Rocket River

 

This wasn't statutory rape - it was taking a 13 year old girl who came in for a photo shot and just raping her. It's a heinous crime. And it's sad that after all he had been through - pain that no human should have suffered - by being a Holocaust victim and survivor as a boy and having his 8-month pregnant wife murdered by Charles Manson for simply living in the wrong house after she pleaded for her baby's life.

That's tough. The guy deserves pity.

But he also needs to pay the piper for his crime. He should be convicted and go to jail. Otherwise, anyone can believe you can commit a crime and get away with it just by fleeing the country.

 

This is a pretty good article. Look, I don't think Polanski deserves a pass for his behavior 31 years ago, but I also don't think it's a simple as some make it out to be. At any rate, an interesting read:


Polanski's arrest puts 31-year-old case on international stage

Karl Vick, Washington Post

Sunday, September 27, 2009

(09-27) 19:41 PDT Los Angeles --

The arrest of director Roman Polanski in Switzerland on charges of fleeing sentencing for the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles pushed into the diplomatic realm a case that for 31 years existed, at least in America, chiefly in the dominion of celebrity and notoriety.

Polanski, 76, was arrested at the Zurich airport Saturday night by Swiss authorities acting at the request of the Los Angeles district attorney's office. Prosecutors there had learned of the Oscar-winning director's plans to attend a film festival in his honor, and passed a request through the U.S. Justice Department.

The arrest outraged the government of France, which has declined to extradite Polanski since he fled to his native land in 1978, after a Los Angeles judge signaled he would scotch a plea agreement in the sex case. In France, Polanski is revered both as a filmmaker and as a martyr to American injustice and puritanism.

Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand issued a statement saying he "profoundly regrets that a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already known so many during his life."

Polanski also received support from Poland, where he moved as a toddler and avoided capture by the Nazis, who put his mother to death in a concentration camp. "I am considering approaching the American authorities over the possibility of the U.S. president proclaiming an act of clemency, which would settle the matter once and for all," said Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski, according to the PAP news agency.

The arrest baffled some in Hollywood. "I think it's absolutely ridiculous," said Bill Flicker, a film editor who once worked with Polanski in France. "It's stupid and a waste of resources. I don't understand why they are doing it."

After winning acclaim for his films in Poland, Polanski wowed Hollywood with "Rosemary's Baby" and "Chinatown." He won the Best Director Oscar in 2003 for "The Pianist," set in a Nazi death camp.

Among the director's supporters on the American side was his victim, Samantha Geimer, who was 13 when Polanski took her to bed during a photo shoot in the home of his friend Jack Nicholson. She said a decade ago that she felt no anger toward Polanski and most recently made her feelings known in "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," a 2008 HBO documentary that made the case for dismissing charges against him.

If Polanski challenges the extradition, the process could drag on for months, according to officials. Neither his attorney nor prosecutors returned calls Sunday.

When Polanski fled the United States in 1978, the facts of the case against him were no longer in dispute. He had pleaded guilty to having sex with an underage girl, and in exchange for that admission, the district attorney had agreed that he should be sentenced to the time in jail he had already served.

But the judge in the case, Laurence Rittenband, sent word that he would not honor the plea bargain and was inclined to send a stern message. Rather than face as much as 50 years in prison, Polanski skipped bail. The consensus of the prosecutor, the defense attorney, journalists and others was that the judge's decision was driven by his exceptional appetite for publicity.

By the time Polanski met Geimer, whose mother, Susan Gailey, was dating one of his friends, Polanski's celebrity was already colored by the most notorious mass murder of the 1960s: His wife, actress Sharon Tate, was among those brutally slain by followers of Charles Mason.

The 1969 murder spree was revived in headlines Friday with news of the death, in a California prison, of Susan Atkins at age 61, of brain cancer.

Atkins was the follower of Manson who testified to ignoring the pleas of Tate, 8 1/2 months pregnant, and stabbing her to death in the home she shared with Polanski, where "pigs" was written in blood on the front door. Polanski was on location in London when Atkins and three others carried out the orders of Manson, who joined his followers the following night in killing Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in another neighborhood.

The creepiness and cultish nature of the slaughter was enhanced, both in news reports and the imagination, by images of "Rosemary's Baby," Polanski's hit from the year before, which starred Mia Farrow as a woman giving birth to Satan's child.

Geimer, who now lives in Hawaii, did not respond to requests for comment Sunday. But long ago she came to terms with the incident at Nicholson's home, where Polanski plied her with champagne and gave her part of a quaalude while the director was doing a photo shoot with her for a French magazine.

"I don't carry any feelings of anger towards Polanski," she told People magazine in 1997. "I even have some sympathy for him, what with his mother dying in a concentration camp and his wife Sharon Tate being murdered by Charles Manson's people and spending the last 20 years as a fugitive. Life was hard for him, just like it was for me.

"He did something really gross to me, but it was the media that ruined my life."

Flicker, who to got to know Polanski while working on the 1992 film "Bitter Moon," said the director "loved everything about the United States," adding, "He would jump at the chance to come back to the United States, but not under these circumstances."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/27/MNG519TK7J.DTL

 

The excuses being made here are ridiculous. Who cares if the judge reneged on a plea-bargain? The judge is not obligated to follow any plea bargain. Who cares if he backed out because he thought it would give him bad press? The deal was insane. Time served for raping a 13 year old girl?!

Also, last time I checked, skipping bail to avoid a trial when the judge won't accept a plea bargain is not an acceptable excuse. Neither is being a victim of the Holocaust or having a murdered wife.

The guy raped a 13-year-old girl. End of story.

The law didn't call for what was being offered, that was a deal worked out. I'm sure the punishment for statutory rape of a 13-year-old is much more than "time served."

 

There was a good HBO special on a couple of years ago that corroborated this. I think Polanski was permitted to leave the country to shoot a film in Germany, and a photojournalist shot a picture of him enjoying a beer in a bar or something. I think then the judge saw the picture in a paper and decided it wouldn't look good if he released Polanski outright after time served.

 

And while I agree with you on the notion that he has been through a significant amount of trauma throughout his life, and that that the thing the Nazi regime did were unforgivable and unimaginable, the law is the law, and this is clear cut. It is not like it was consensual sex with a 17 year old who was emancipated and is practically legal and mature in every other sense of the word, this was a 13-year-old child. That's disgusting, he knew what he was doing when he was avoiding those countries, it's only fair that the US caught up with him when he slipped.

To me past trauma and or depression does not excuse future acts in response to them.

 

the purported deal w/ the judge in which he gets off for time already served does not sound kosher......i mean he served less than a year in prison.......for doing this:

Geimer later agreed to a second session, which took place on March 10, 1977 at the Mulholland area home of actor Jack Nicholson in Los Angeles. "We did photos with me drinking champagne," Geimer says. "Toward the end it got a little scary, and I realized he had other intentions and I knew I was not where I should be. I just didn't quite know how to get myself out of there." She recalled in a 2003 interview that she began to feel uncomfortable after he asked her to lie down on a bed, and how she attempted to resist. "I said, ‘No, no. I don’t want to go in there. No, I don’t want to do this. No!", and then I didn’t know what else to do,” she stated.[27]
Geimer testified that Polanski performed various sexual acts on her[28][29][30] after giving her a combination of champagne and quaaludes.[31]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Polanski

 

Except the prosecutor didn't feel he could prove that's what happened for the reasons above (subsequently, that version of events has never been proved), thus the plea bargain covering statutory rape was agreed upon.

The defense, the prosecutor, and the judge agreed that in exchange for pleading guilty on statutory rape, the rest of the charges would be dropped and Polanski's sentence would be X. After agreeing to plead guilty (and, crucially, not fight the case), though, Polanski's defense (and the prosecutor) believed, by all accounts correctly, that the judge secretly planned not to honor the agreement, and arbitrarily sentence him to sentence Y (Y = likely the rest of his life). If the judge thought the agreed-upon deal was too lenient, he should have invalidated it and demanded an actual trial (in which Polanski would have a shot at disproving the charges against him), not arbitrarily changed the sentence already agreed upon.

That's a perversion of our justice system. One cannot agree to plead guilty to a crime based on a guarantee of a reduced sentence, then, having pled guilty, without recourse, be sentenced to life imprisonment.

Whether that perversion of justice is equal to the original crime is unlikely, yes. However, that does not mean that Polanski ever would have faced justice in that trial, if justice is defined as what the state sentenced most other statutory rapists. He was not against the state of California; the state of California agreed to the plea bargain. He was against the vanity of the judge, who because of Polanski's celebrity and the attention the case was garnering was willing to extralegally invalidate that plea bargain to burnish his own public perception.

 

Maybe he should be allowed to renege his guilty plea. Some people plead guilty when they wouldn't otherwise because the deal presented is better than facing an unpredictable jury. Since our justice system isn't perfect and innocent people go to prison, I'm sure there are some who have gone the route of plea-bargaining also.

Maybe the girl lied about her age and it was consensual and feeling guilty later changed her story. There are a lot of things that we don't know to state for sure that the guy raped her. We don't have all the facts. Maybe that is what happened and that is why they came up with the original plea bargain.

 

Just to point out again that there is no such thing as consensual sex between a minor and someone 30 years older.

 

So.
It is ok for his CELEBRITY to get him and ULTRA LENIENT SENTENCE
but
not ok for his CELEBRITY to work against him?

Rocket River
and this is why everyone wants to be a CELEBRITY

" . . . some folx are just MORE EQUAL than others " - Paraphrasing 'Animal Farm'

 

do you have any comparisons of other similar cases and how the perpetrators were sentenced at the time?

 

www.google.com

type "race card" in the search box

pick an image from the selections

save yourself the time and just post said image in the future

 

Rocket River is misguided in arguing for a racial bias here, but there is definitely a bias at work. Forget the man is a director that some here seem to adore and forget that his (beautiful) wife was stabbed to death while pregnant.

The man had sex with a 13 year old girl. There are no extenuating circumstances here that should create sympathy in this case. That there was a plea deal in place says more about the poor attitudes that existed at the time against sexual violence than any mitigating circumstances.

Any you can throw all the words around you want to describe the judge, the DA, the victim, etc., but at the end of the day when you justify him fleeing the country this is what your saying: "He raped a 13 year old girl and admitted it and then was afraid of the punishment he might get that followed the law and fled. That's OK with me."

 

I doubt he will be extradicted....

DD

 

I see your point, but there's no proof that his celebrity got him the lenient sentence to begin with. Polanski had a competent lawyer, which anyone in the middle- / upper-middle class and above can afford.

And, based on the hard-to-prove nature of the rape itself, other than the age of the victim involved, that lawyer worked a deal with the prosecutor that was seen as fair by all involved. (Not saying it was right, but this was still an era in which marriage by high-schoolers was a societal norm, and statutory rape was treated less severely than it is now.)

The prosecutor, by most accounts, including his willingness to seek sanctions against the judge even though it would have helped his career to stay quiet, is/was a straight shooter, and not prone to be influenced by celebrity/the press. I think it's pretty clear that Polanski's celebrity as a foreigner, a horror movie director who many still suspected in the murder of his wife, pretty unambiguously worked against him.

Average, everyday Joe McChildRapist, having pled guilty, would at the time have gotten off with much less of a punishment than Polanski faced. (Having been born with that name, how could society blame him?) So, his choice was either to flee to his home country and face no punishment (if his home country saw the case in the same manner, and chose not to extradite, which France did), or stay in the States and face a punishment significantly longer / more arduous than other statutory rapists received.

Clearly, he made the self-serving choice, but I don't see how either option could be considered justice.

 

He admitted to raping her. Dude! He Raped her. He doesn't deny it. He didn't just have consensual sex. Understand that this is not statutory rape, it's actual rape.

Since when do rapists get a free pass because they have suffered and are a great filmmaker?

The guy did a terrible injustice. Shame on him for doing that to another after all he has suffered.

At the end of the day, he committed a serious crime. This isn't a case of a 16 year old girl sleeping with a teacher. It's a freaking 40 year old man raping a girl who thought she was doing work.

 

That's fine. Let him rescind or retract his plea (what's the correct terminology for that?). I'm confident the evidence, combined with witness testimony and the photographs, will be enough to convict him, especially when combined with his bail-jumping. Send him to a Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

He. Raped. A. Girl.

I can't believe people are defending that.

 

Am I?
Was this not the very sight were various *s*****
came to the Mike Jackson Thread
and RAKED THE DEAD MAN OVER THE COALS
because
THEY *THOUGHT* HE TOUCH A KID INAPPROPRIATELY?
Maybe gave the kid some wine.
Not only was it not EVER PROVEN
but . . . he was found not guilty
but
Folx Persists . .and hounded him til he died and beyond

NOW!
An Admitted Child Rapist and Bail Jumper is suppose to get my sympathy?
It is a FRICKING INJUSTICE that he was captured?
The Judge was wrong .. this person was wrong .. everyone was wrong
but the ADMITTED CHILD RAPIST AND BAIL JUMPER

Fact: She was 13
Fact: He had sex with her
Fact: He fled the country

Question: If this were Michael Jackson . . . Do You Think the Reaction would be different?

Rocket River

 

In as much as a minor can give consent (obviously, she cannot), I'm pretty sure Polanski claimed the incident to be consensual. He pled guilty only to the age-related part of the crime.

It's odd that the maker of Repulsion and Death & the Maiden, films about the horrific lifelong repercussions of rape (one made well before, one after), was alleged to be guilty of the same crime.

(Noting: I find the victim's version of events to be likely / convincing, but they were ultimately never proven to be so.)

Dude, did you miss the three week long orgy of Michael Jackson hagiography? The court of public opinion was pretty settled on him being a pervert (who liked them even younger, as pre-adolescents), based on him buying off multiple cases brought by the parents of children, then he died, then for weeks on end the news coverage was basically fawning. If anything, his alleged deviancy was seriously underplayed by the media.

Polanski also was never convicted of forcible rape (other than pleading to statutory rape), and he will also forever be a pariah. I don't see your point.