76-year-old filmmaker Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland last night, stemming from charges in a 1977 unlawful sex with a teenage girl trial that saw the Oscar-winning director flee the U.S. permanently.
A stateside fugitive for life, the director memorably did not show up to receive his 2003 Oscar for “The Pianist.” The award was accepted by Harrison Ford who announced the winner and also appeared in his 1988 film, “Frantic.”
Polanski was set to be in Switzerland to receive a Lifetime Achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival, but instead was greeted by police when he arrived at the airport and was arrested. In case you think this was all an orchestrated ruse, the Zurich festival organizers said they “received this news with great consternation and shock.”
Does this mean extradition of Polanski to the U.S., and was it a coordinated effort with the Los Angeles police or L.A. Justice Department? Doesn’t sound like it. Update 2: L.A. prosecutors planned the arrest according to the L.A. Times. A spokesperson for the Zurich police said the orders were carried out from the Swiss Federal Justice Department in Berne. Legal expatriation seems imminent, but it’s not mentioned in this Reuters report, but bringing Polanski to justice or the U.S. presumably is part of the plan unless he plans to fight the charges in Switzerland. One things for sure, L.A. prosecutors are now playing serious, hig-stakes hardball with the director. Update: The New York Times says the filmmaker is in provisional detention and reports that the Swiss police have had hopes to arrest the director since 2005. However, Polanski had visited in 2008 and was not arrested, a Swiss police spokesperson declined to comment as to why – now we know why obviously, the Swiss weren’t actively after him.
According to the LAT, L.A. prosecutors sent a provisional arrest warrant to the U.S. Justice Department, which presented it to Swiss authorities when they learned he would be attending the event. The U.S. will have to formally submit an extradition request. His lawyers told France-Inter radio, ”For now we are trying to have the arrest warrant lifted in Zurich.”
“If he agrees with an extradition, he could be sent to the U.S. in the next days,” said Guido Ballmer, a spokesman for the Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police.
The arrest comes more than nine months after trying to negotiate a surrender with the L.A. Justice Department with an eye towards settlement or having the case eventually dismissed, but the terms of a surrender within the confines of the U.S. could not be agreed upon. Three months ago, Polanski’s lawyers submitted a request to the state appeals court to overturn a May 2009 decision that refused to throw the three-decades-old child sex case out of court. The message from the L.A. office seemed firm and clear from day one: surrender inside the U.S. and we’ll discuss dismissing this case, but Polanski feared he would be jailed or detained in the interim and would not submit to that possible chance.
All of this really started in the summer of 2008 a few months after the release of the Marina Zenovich directed documentary “Roman Polanski: Wanted & Desired,” which illustrated many legal improprieties in the original case, and sparked the filmmaker’s wishes to have the case dismissed on grounds of ethical and prosecutorial misconduct. As reported earlier this year, the now 45-year-old victim, Samantha Geimer, not only publicly asked the trial to be dismissed, she actually filed an affidavit supporting dismissal of the case back in January of 2009, but this likely has no bearing on his failure to to appear at his sentencing on the statutory-rape conviction in 1978 and his subsequent flight from the U.S.
Polanski’s 18th feature-length film, “The Ghost” starring Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams and others finished shooting earlier this year for an intended 2010 release. The Zurich retrospective of Polanski will carry on as planned, but the Times quotes the organizers as being outraged with the authorities, “not only a grotesque farce of justice, but also an immense cultural scandal.”