According to the Los Angeles Times, director Roman Polanski’s legal team have asked a state appeals court to overturn a May decision that refused to throw out the three-decades-old child sex case that has kept Polanski from returning to the United States.
Read the LA Times article for the full details, but the Reader’s Digest version of the story thus far: in 1977 Polanski pleaded guilty to having sex with a 13 year-old girl (at Jack Nicholson’s house, naturally). After the director spent 42 days in jail, the director (known for exploring the dark corners of the human soul in films like “Chinatown” and “Rosemary’s Baby”) bolted before the trail – and has never returned to the States since.
After last year’s wonderful HBO documentary “Roman Polanksi: Wanted and Desired”‘ uncovered some severe misconduct on the part of the star-fucking judge in charge of the case, Laurence Rittenband. So Polanski’s lawyers fired back at the course, based on the evidence presented in the documentary, and asked for the case to be dismissed (even though Polanski has said he has no interest in returning to America). In May, the decision was made not to throw the case out because essentially Polanski had been on the run for so long. Will this thing ever end? The back and forth on this has been ongoing seemingly for two years now.
No one at The Playlist condones sex with 13 year-old girls, that documentary definitely opened our eyes to some improprieties in the case, and Polanski is 75 years old for crying out loud. It is pretty amazing that this case, already tangled up in the collision of media and law, keeps finding itself at those same crossroads. – Drew Taylor