Filmmaker Roman Polanski on Friday won his libel suit against the publisher of Vanity Fair magazine over an article that accused him of propositioning a woman while on the way to the funeral of his murdered wife.
Polanski, director of Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist, was awarded £50 000 (R577 000) in damages.
The jury of nine men and three women took four-and-a-half hours to reach their unanimous verdict at London’s High Court.
”It goes without saying that, whilst the whole episode is a sad one, I am obviously pleased with the jury’s verdict today,” Polanski said in a statement.
Polanski sued Vanity Fair‘s publisher, Conde Nast, over a 2002 article that accused him of propositioning a woman while on the way to the funeral of his wife, Sharon Tate, who was killed by followers of murder mastermind Charles Manson in 1969.
The article alleged that Polanski put his hand on the woman’s thigh and promised her: ”I will make another Sharon Tate out of you.”
Polanski’s lawyer, John Kelsey-Fry, said Polanski had been ”monstrously libelled for the sake of a lurid anecdote”.
In a weeklong case that featured lurid probing of Polanski’s sex life and testimony in his defence from movie star Mia Farrow, lawyers for Vanity Fair labelled Polanski a ”refugee from morality”.
Polanski, who won an Oscar in 2003 for his Holocaust drama The Pianist, has lived in France since fleeing child-sex charges in the United States in 1978. He was unwilling to travel to Britain for fear of extradition, but was allowed to testify by video.
Vanity Fair‘s lawyer, Tom Shields, told the jury on Thursday that Polanski’s ”law of morality” knew no rules — ”only violations of civilized conduct which, it appears, can be readily excused”.
Conde Nast maintained the article was substantially true.
The magazine’s publisher accepted that the alleged incident did not happen before Tate’s funeral, but alleged that it happened about two weeks later. Polanski’s lawyers deny the incident ever occurred. — Sapa-AP