Polanski could face 50-year jail sentence

Published on Sunday 27 September 2009 22:47

THE award-winning director Roman Polanski was last night facing extradition to the United States in connection with a charge of having sex with an underage girl more than three decades ago.

The maximum possible sentence for the offence is 50 years.

Police in Switzerland arrested the 76-year-old on a 1978 US arrest warrant after he flew in to receive an honorary award at the Zurich Film Festival.

The British author, Robert Harris, said the Swiss authorities were guilty of "disgusting treatment", adding that the arrest appeared to be politically motivated.

The Oscar-winning director was detained at Zurich airport late on Saturday evening, and he was being held at a police station in the city yesterday.

Polanski, whose films include The Pianist, Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby, has admitted sleeping with Samantha Geirner, then aged 13, in 1977, but later fled the US.

He has spent the last three decades in France but visited Zurich to pick up the award.

Stefan Oberlin, a police spokesman in Zurich, confirmed Polanski's arrest.

Guido Balmer, a spokesman for the Swiss Justice Ministry, said: "There was a valid arrest request and we knew when he was coming. That's why he was taken into custody." Mr Balmer said the US would now have to make a formal extradition request.

Polanski's lawyer Georges Kiejman said: "We are going to try to lift the arrest warrant in Zurich … the (extradition] convention between Switzerland and the US is not very clear."

Harris, who had been working with Polanski on an adaptation of his novel, The Ghost, starring Ewan McGregor, said: "I am shocked that any man of 76, whether distinguished or not, should have been treated in such a fashion."

Harris added that Polanski owns a house in Gstaad, Switzerland, and had spent most of July and August there. "If he was such a wanted criminal, why did they let him own a house and travel back and forth freely?" he said.

Frederic Mitterrand, the French culture minister, said he was "stunned" to hear of Polanski's arrest, adding that President Nicolas Sarkozy hoped the matter could be resolved to allow Polanski to return to his family.

Earlier this year, the director's legal team asked a US appeals court in California to overturn a judge's refusal to throw out his case. He claims misconduct by the now-deceased judge who had arranged a plea bargain and then reneged on it.

Organisers of the Zurich festival said Polanski's detention had caused "shock and dismay", but they would go ahead with a retrospective of the director's work. The Swiss Directors Association sharply criticised authorities for what it deemed "not only a grotesque farce of justice, but also an immense cultural scandal".

A native of France who was taken to Poland by his parents, Polanski escaped Krakow's Jewish ghetto as a child and lived off the charity of strangers. His mother died at the Auschwitz Nazi death camp.

In 1969, Polanski's wife, actress Sharon Tate, and four other people were murdered by followers of Charles Manson. She was eight months pregnant.

The incident which would haunt him for the rest of his career occurred 31 years ago, when he was accused of raping a teenager while photographing her during a modelling session.

The girl said Polanski plied her with champagne and part of a Quaalude pill at the house of actor Jack Nicholson. She said that, despite her protests, he performed sex acts on her and had intercourse. Polanski was allowed to plead guilty to one of six charges, unlawful sexual intercourse, and was sent to prison for 42 days of evaluation.

Lawyers agreed that would be his full sentence, but the judge tried to renege on the plea bargain. Aware the judge would sentence him to more prison time and require his voluntary deportation, Polanski fled to France.

The now 45-year-old victim, Samantha Geimer, has backed Polanski's bid to have the case dismissed, saying she wants to draw a line under the incident.