Sep 28, 2009, 14:22 GMT
Paris - For more than 30 years, film director Roman Polanski lived under the threat of a US arrest warrant from his conviction for unlawful intercourse with a 13-year-old girl.
For more than 30 years, film director Roman Polanski lived under the threat of a US arrest warrant from his conviction for unlawful intercourse with a 13-year-old girl. © Pixplanete / PR Photos
That was why he did not travel to the United States in 2003 to accept the Oscar for Best Director for his Holocaust film The Pianist.
Instead, actor Harrison Ford accepted the statuette and later handed it to Polanski in France, where the director of such highly acclaimed films as Repulsion and Chinatown has been living since 1978 to avoid arrest.
But the past caught up to the 76-year-old Polanski late Saturday, when he was taken into custody by Swiss authorities as he arrived in Zurich to accept an award for his life's work at the Zurich Film Festival.
On Monday, he sat in a Swiss jail as his lawyers attempted to free him and US justice authorities awaited his extradition, presumably to sentence him.
The affair began in 1977 when Polanski, then 44, asked the mother of 13-year-old Samantha Geimer if he could photograph the girl for the French edition of the fashion magazine Vogue, which he had been invited to edit.
Nothing happened during the shoot, except that Polanski asked the girl to change in front of him, according to what Geimer said in 2003.
The girl and her mother agreed to a second photo session, which took place in the house of actor Jack Nicholson, who starred in the film many people consider Polanski's masterpiece, Chinatown.
'We did photos with me drinking champagne,' Geimer said later. '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.'
According to the girl's grand jury testimony, in addition to plying her with champagne, Polanski also gave her Quaaludes, a sedative and muscle relaxant that also increases sexual arousal.
'I was kind of dizzy,' she told the grand jury, according to excerpts posted on The Smoking Gun web site. 'I was having trouble with my coordination, like walking and stuff.'
Then, she said, Polanski had sex with her. 'But I wasn't fighting really because there was no one else there and I had no place to go,' she testified.
Polanski was initially charged with rape, sodomy, performing a lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor.
After plea bargaining, the charges were reduced to engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, to which Polanski pleaded guilty.
But in 1978, after spending 42 days at Chino Sate Prison for psychiatric evaluation, he fled to France, where he held citizenship. As a rule, France does not allow its citizens to be extradited.
Polanski's flight began a 31-year international cat-and-mouse game that ended Sunday at the Zurich Airport.
However, weeks of legal manoeuvring lie ahead. If Polanski does not waive his right to appeal the extradition, he can challenge the arrest warrant and the extradition order by appealing in the Swiss federal court of justice.
The legal process could take 'months, if not longer,' Swiss Justice Ministry spokesman Guido Balmer told the Los Angeles Times. If returned to the United States, Polanski could be sentenced to as much as four years in prison, legal experts say.
In the meantime, his victim has forgiven him.
'I think he's sorry, I think he knows it was wrong,' Geimer, a mother of three sons, said in 2008. 'I don't think he needs to be locked up forever ... It was 30 years ago now. It's an unpleasant memory ... (but) I can live with it.'
Your Talkback on this Story