Roman Polanski, a sexual predator? Not in the eyes of the French media, which tend to describe him as the victim of a money-grabbing American mother and a publicity-hungry Californian judge.
The woman in question was Susan Gailey, whose daughter, Samantha, was at the centre of the case that led to Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland.
The French view is that Mrs Gailey pushed the 13-year-old — now known as Samantha Geimer — into Polanski’s arms in the hope of a movie career.
For the generation of French commentators who grew up the 1960s, Polanski was guilty only of pushing back the boundaries of sexual liberation.
The other figure in a tale that highlights the Franco-American gulf is Laurence J. Rittenband, the judge in charge of the case, who died in 1993. He is accused in France of reneging on his word over a plea bargain, making a series of procedural errors and using Polanski’s name to earn himself celebrity.
For France, there has never been any question of extraditing Polanski to the United States because he holds a French passport. Nor has his reputation been tarnished in Paris by the events of 1977. Instead, he is seen as a hero unjustly persecuted by America’s prosecutors and media.
The view could hardly be more different from that in Los Angeles where the authorities objected to the director’s attempt last year to have the case overturned, based on allegations of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct.
It emerged yesterday that the district attorney’s official in Los Angeles found out last week about Polanski’s trip to Zurich and immediately sent a provisional arrest warrant to the US Justice Department, which then passed it on to the Swiss authorities.
The district attorney’s office in Los Angeles had made similar moves on two previous occasions when Polanski planned to visit countries with extradition treaties with the US, but it was foiled both times.
“In the end, he apparently found out about [the warrants] and didn’t go,” a spokeswoman for the district attorney told the Los Angeles Times yesterday.
The spokeswoman would not comment on whether Polanski would be imprisoned when or if he arrived in the US pending the hearing of his case.
“We initially recommended prison time for him [in 1977] but I cannot see into the future,” she said. “We have always maintained that this is a matter between Polanski and the court.”
