The Roman Polanski-Seattle Connection

Septuagenarian child rapist and fugitive Oscar-winner in the news, Roman Polanski is stewing in a Swiss jail while celebrities including Woody Allen, known for his high morals, protest his possible extradition to the U.S. He fled this country, rather than do jail time, after the sensational 1977 trial in which he essentially took a plea for dosing a 13-year-old girl with Quaaludes and sodomizing her. The documentary account of that trial and its aftermath, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, played here in July, 2008. Then, in September of 2008, local author Christopher Sandford published his biography Polanski, which added further detail to a creepy/compelling life story. (Polanski, a Holocaust survivor, seems to have developed the attitude that his life's early hardships gave him a free pass for future transgressions.)

So I called our local Polanski expert to ask him about the director's sudden return to the front pages. Has Sandford been following these new developments? "I have indeed. It's fascinating and in some ways, without getting too highfalutin about it, there's a sort of Greek tragedy to it. The guy set these wheels in motion 30 years ago, and it seems like they're grinding slowly to a conclusion..."

Sandford continues:

"...I'm not a lawyer. So I really don't know the legal intricacies [of the case]. The Swiss, and the French, and the United States have all got their thumbs in the pie. Polanski has said a number of times over the years that he's prepared to go so far as standing in court and saying, 'I committed this criminal act and I'm sorry.' But he doesn't want to stand in the middle of a tabloid frenzy again."

Ironically, Polanski may have made things worse in that regard by first fleeing and then resisting any sort of settlement over the decades. Back in 1977, let's remember, there was no Internet, no YouTube, no TMZ.com, no 24-7 cable news cycle. Another Polanski trial today? Sandford knows what that would be like:

"I can understand the guy's reluctant to submit himself to an OJ-style media frenzy. But it seems to me, he can't have it both ways. He can't have a hermetically sealed court process."

And Polanski may have engineered circumstances, strictly so far as the media are concerned, for the worse by antagonizing Graydon Carter and the Condé Nast empire:

"He chose to sue Vanity Fair in 2005," Sandford explains, "because they had made some inaccurate observation about what he did shortly after Sharon Tate was murdered. Essentially what they said is that he'd flown to New York after the funeral, and he tried to pick up a woman. And they got it all wrong. And he went ballistic, and he sued Vanity Fair.

"He ended up suing them in a British court system, because they're generally more receptive to libel claims. And he gave his courtroom testimony by way of a satellite link to London. He won the right not only to do that, but he won the libel case.

"He will play the justice game, but he wants to play it on his own terms. He won a legal precedent in Britain. But whether he can swing it this time, without being surrounded by paparazzi and cameramen, I kind of doubt."

That was four years ago. And Polanski really hasn't done much as a director since winning the Academy Award for the overrated The Pianist (see Tim Appelo's review). He's old, and Sandford has some small amount of pity for the guy:

"My own guess is that he will eventually come back [extradited to the U.S.]. This is purely a guess, and that they'll make some kind of arrangement that [he admits] he did what he did and he fled their jurisdiction. I can't honestly see that a 76-year-old guy, and by then he'd be near 80, would be would be incarcerated for a crime that's 35 years old. I really can't see him doing jail time. I don't want the guy to go to jail."

But at the same time, Sandford adds, if a man in his 40s raped a 13-old-girl today, "He'd be looking at substantial jail time," and deservedly so.

Meanwhile, as extradition proceedings will likely continue in Switzerland for months, the paperback edition of Sandford's book will be published November 24. Perfect timing! Well, says Sandford, "I don't think we're going to try and paste in a new addition to the text." It's too late to redesign the cover or write a new forward. But you could still slap stickers on the jacket that say, As Seen on TV!, as Polanski likely will be again.

And back in Seattle, Sandford may be watching, even though his next book is on a completely different sort of celebrity: Imran Khan, the Pakistani cricket star-turned-politician. And his next biographical project? Harry Houdini, the great escape artist whom Polanski would no doubt like to emulate right now.