A lawyer for Roman Polanski has mounted what could be the Oscar-winning film-maker’s final bid to overturn a three-decade-old sex charge that saw him flee the US in 1978 after admitting “unlawful sexual intercourse” with a 13-year-old girl.
Alan M Dershowitz, who has represented heiress Patty Hearst and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, is asking to represent the 81-year-old director of Chinatown and The Pianist in the Los Angeles county superior court. A case was filed there on Monday, according to the New York Times.
Polanski has been living in Paris since fleeing the US to avoid a likely custodial sentence in 1978. However, a warrant remains in force ensuring he would be arrested if he returned to America.
As a French citizen he is unlikely to face extradition while on home territory but was arrested by officials in Poland in October following a US request and spent more than nine months under house arrest in Switzerland in 2009 and 2010 in similar circumstances. Neither incident led to Polanski’s extradition but the film-maker’s legal team say the US justice system has “deliberately omitted the fact that Polanski has already served the term of imprisonment imposed by the trial judge” in seeking to bring him back for sentencing.
The director is understood to be planning a trip to Poland to shoot a new film about 19th-century French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus and wants to ensure he will not face legal consequences if he does so. Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jew, was falsely accused of passing secrets to Germany in 1894 in a well-known historical episode that gave rise to suspicions of antisemitism in the French military establishment of the period.
The original 1977 incident involving Polanski, which sparked a media storm at the time, reportedly took place after the director booked 13-year-old Samantha Gaimer as a model for a Vogue photo shoot. He is alleged to have given her champagne and the sedative quaaludes before having sex with her at the Mulholland Drive home of his friend Jack Nicholson. Gaimer publicly forgave the director in 1997 after self-identifying as his victim and has since called for the case against him to be dismissed.
Polanski skipped the country after it became clear he could face a 50-year sentence, despite having already served 42 days behind bars as part of a 90-day plea bargain in which he accepted a charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor that he had assumed deferred the possibility of further punishment. The original judge in the case, Laurence J Rittenband, was accused of changing his mind in the 2008 documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which has formed the basis of earlier attempts to free the director from the risk of further prosecution. However, renewed publicity in 2009 surrounding Polanski’s alleged mistreatment of Geimer - he was originally charged with rape and sodomy - saw the film-maker’s reputation in the US further damaged.
Polanski’s legal team nevertheless argues that he is not a continuing flight risk and points out that he voluntarily agree to speak to authorities in Poland earlier this year. A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney, Jackie Lacey, declined when asked to comment on the case by the Times.
