You might think a man married to a Franco-American, heading the Washington-based IMF and wanting to be president of France would hardly be the type to abscond while on bail. But while American courts frequently make decisions that look pretty dumb, as they'd call it, they are smart enough to remember the case of Roman Polanski. Any Frenchman on serious charges, even Dominique Strauss-Kahn or maybe especially him, can therefore expect one heck of a fight to get out pending trial. This is a simple reminder of a piece from Salut! two years ago as Polanski fought his ultimately successful battle to avoid belated extradition; not all of it is relevant to today, but it had to be all or nothing and enough seems pertinent to make it worth reproducing as it originally appeared. The episode was mentioned in support of objections to DSK's plea for bail ...
The nearest I have come to meeting Roman Polanski was in 2005, in Paris. British judges, in the established traditions of the judiciary, had disgracefully allowed him to sue an American magazine in a London court, and to testify by video link from France to ensure no unpleasantness with the law over that pesky old child abuse business back in California.
As a reporter based in the French capital, I made an optimistic pitch for an interview which would have run at the end of the case. It was to be a happy outcome for Mr Polanski since the jury, denied access to important defence evidence, did what libel juries do, found in his favour and awarded him a handy little windfall of £50,000.
Not surprisingly, my approach led nowhere. Mr Polanski, unquestionably a brilliant film director however morally deficient he may be, replied courteously to the effect that he never gave interviews.
This was not strictly true. Talking about the case in which he had admitted unlawful sex with a child of 13 back in 1977, only to abscond on the eve of sentencing, he once complained to Martin Amis that the press was more obsessed with him than if he had been a murderer. This, by implication - and I am quoting here from Nick Cohen's column in The Observer, itself quoting from the Amis interview - was because his crime involved a young girl. Judges, juries, "everyone" wanted to **** young girls, he said.
Still, he had every right to turn away the impudent request from a British hack. He then went on to break his own rule again, offering his thoughts on the libel trial to a persistent tabloid reporter who had cleverly located the Parisian studio where he was participating in the proceedings with the blessing of kindly Law Lords for whom being a sex criminal on the run was no bar to the right to wads of cash from a publisher.
To be honest, he even had something of a case against the magazine, Vanity Fair, which had run a dodgy tale suggesting that he tried to grope a young woman in a New York restaurant shortly after the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate. But it remains unclear to this day how the jury calculated that he had £50,000 worth of reputation to lose.
In the car the other day, we were discussing Polanksi's arrest in Switzerland. Unlike France, where he has made his home for the past 30-odd years, Switzerland has the sort of extradition treaty with America that would make the averagely bright fugitive, or so you would think, avoid it like the plague.
One of my passengers, who worked in the film industry for people who dealt with Polanski, adopted the French party line and said the Swiss were wrong to contemplate shipping him back for a delayed date with justice in California. A second, who works in the industry now, thought he should be treated like any child molester and, no matter how gifted a director he may be, get his comeuppance.
I am caught between the two positions.
On the one hand, Polanski has no right to escape punishment for what he did. That he has gone on, while in exile, to make great films - The Pianist, among them, is a masterpiece as far as I am concerned - is, in reality, neither here nor there. That he is old (76) is something a wise judge would probably take into account when sentencing, though it is no more a defence for him than for those many elderly men hauled before the courts late in life for vile crimes against their daughters, stepdaughters and nieces decades earlier.
It is true that the abused girl, now in her 40s of course, has declared that she does not wish to see Polanski jailed for what he did. Again, though, that is a mitigating factor, not a defence (Polanski is reported to have agreed a large financial settlement with her, though it is not known whether this has been paid).
So what are the arguments against extraditing him? There is really only one: the nature of the American justice system.
The shrill voices in favour of banging him up for ever are at least as obnoxious as those saying we should leave the poor old man alone. I would not willingly deliver any individual to an American court, without the firmest of guarantees as to his or her ultimate treatment, and that applies to a sex offender as much as to a computer hacker.
The Swiss should investigate the original plea bargaining deal on which Polanski claims his trial judge was about to renege, causing him to flee. They should consider what the appropriate penalty would be if imposed in a Swiss court, giving credit for the various mitigating factors.
If it can somehow be agreed that the Americans would not proceed to lock him up and hide the key (something they are rather good at), but sentence him according to civilised standards, Polanski should then be sent back.
I'd have thought a one-year jail sentence, demonstrating that wealth, fame and artistic genius are not answers in law to criminal charges, would be about right, with a whacking great fine for running away from the original trial 32 years ago. And if it is shown, or accepted, that the original sentencing deal provided for a shorter term, that is the one that should apply.
And once that is out of the way, let's lock up those Law Lords for a few months for their affront to natural justice.
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