TheFearless
ROMAN pOLANSKI
"Polanski is a monster, and the evil he perpetrated on that child demands punishment. No 'buts'.
—Dennis Miller
At age 44 in 1977 Roman Polanski was not a troubled man with poor judgment but familiar with child rape and an astonishing predator acting.
Now at age 76, Polanski pretends to be something else, something he is not...and he is good at it.
Arrested in Zurich, Switzerland in September 2009 on an international fugitive warrant in connection with the 1977 child molestation case, this "virgin killer" rapist had been on the lam 31 years; a petition for exoneration by his peers asking for his freedom without legal redress.
As the Swiss government considered the extradition request, Polanski (director of "Rosemary's Baby" and "Chinatown") argued that U.S. justice, politically motivated by a Los Angeles prosecutor seeking publicity, is unfair because he had already served his sentence—45 days confinement at California's Chino prison in 1977; but prosecutors argue that was only for his evaluation by psychologists before his sentencing.
Learning that the judge might not go along with the short jail term he expected, Polanski in 1978 fled the U.S. for France.
In 1983...a British actress says she was sexually abused by Roman Polanski during that year when she was 16-years old after being cast in a Polanski film in Paris.
Alan Duke, reporting for CNN
May 14, 2010 in Los Angeles, California:
"He sexually abused me in the worst possible way when I was just 16 years old," said Charlotte Lewis, now 42. She said the incident happened in 1983. Lewis said she was coming forward now because Polanski's "legal team is portraying his previous offense against a minor as an isolated incident." Lawyer Gloria Allred, who is representing Lewis, said they met with Los Angeles police investigators and a prosecutor because she thinks the judge can "consider credible claims of predatory conduct" by Polanski when sentencing him on the older case."Mr. Polanski knew that I was only 16 years old when he met me and forced himself upon me in his apartment in Paris," Lewis said.
Neither Allred nor Lewis would describe how Polanski used force against the actress.
Lewis appeared in Polanski's "Pirates," an Oscar-nominated movie starring Walter Matthau, Allred said. The movie was released in 1986.
"He took advantage of me, and I have lived with the effects of his behavior ever since it occurred," Lewis said. "All I want is justice."
Polanski's defense team issued a short statement in response."We don't have any information about statements made at a Gloria Allred press conference today, but we do know that our district attorney continues to refuse to provide the Swiss government with accurate and complete information relevant to the extradition issue," defense spokeswoman Lynne Doll said.
The documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired limned the 1977 back-room dealing between prosecutors and a judge obsessed about his public image and worried how it might suffer should Polanski's sentence be commuted to time-served.
Following the film director's arrest in Zurich, a Los Angeles judge ruled that Polanski must return to the U.S. to consider if his legal argument while rejecting a request by the victim in that the case against the film director be be dropped.
Polanski has gone on record for being "sorry"...and so have countless Catholic priests among other pedophiles. Sorry, no doubt, that they got caught.
The apologia of Polanski's defenders, as proffered by celebrity petitioners, is that the real price for raping a 13-year-old child is not his serving time in prison but rather the movie-going public being deprived of his filmmaking genius. This Machiavellian logic is intended, of course, to withstand his confession for "statutory rape"; his 30-plus years as a fugitive proffered as time-served for having sex with an underage child, a virgin that he falsely imprisoned, denuded, photographed, groped, drugged, raped and sodomized.
The fugitive director had been at large in Europe (a luxury Paris apartment) for more than 20 years, since skipping bail after a plea agreement for "unlawful sex" with a minor. Once the handcuffs were clapped on his wrists in Zurich, he began his fight against extradition to the United States. Swiss authorities released the director from jail on $4.5 million bail in early December, "pending extradition" to the United States.
July 2010 Swiss authorities freed Roman Polanski, rejecting the extradition request made by the United States for the movie director to return to a Los Angeles courtroom and face sentencing; the confessed child molester instead may return to France after months of legal wrangling.
Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf held that U.S. officials floundered in producing confidential testimony from the January 2010 hearing regarding Polanski's 1978 sentencing agreement, required to determine if the defendant's 42-day psychiatric evaluation at Chino State Prison constituted his redress (according to the late Laurence J. Rittenband).
Minister Widmer-Schlumpf hung her rejection of the extradition request on an "if":
If...the 42-day interment represented Roman Polanski's entire sentence, then the confessed child molester had served his time so the extradition request has no foundation."
This travesty in Switzerland permits Polanski to escape accountability for raping a child, prolonging the unspeakable nightmare of injustice.
Frederick Louis Richardson
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