Roman Polanski, the Oscar-winning film director and fugitive from American justice, was awarded £50 000 in damages by a high court libel jury on Friday over a claim that he made sexual advances to a Scandinavian woman shortly after his wife Sharon Tate’s brutal murder in 1969.
The nine male and three women jurors at the high court in London took four and a half hours to reach their unanimous verdict that the publisher Condé Nast had libelled the 71-year-old film-maker in a Vanity Fair article alleging that, in the aftermath of Tate’s murder by the Charles Manson gang, Polanski had made a pass at a woman in Elaine’s restaurant in New York.
In its story, published in July 2002, the magazine recounted Lewis Lapham, then a rising young journalist on Manhattan’s literary scene, describing how Polanski had allegedly walked into Elaine’s on the way to Tate’s funeral in California in August 1969 and attempted to proposition a ”Swedish beauty”.
Lapham’s anecdote continued: ”Fascinated by his performance, I watched as he slid his hand inside her thigh and began a long honeyed spiel which ended with the promise ‘And I will make another Sharon Tate out of you’.”
Polanski’s lawyers said the article meant that the film-maker had gone ”on the pull” and exploited the name of his late wife, who was eight months pregnant when she died, as a ”tool of seduction”.
Polanski was absent from court because of his fear of extradition to the US after his flight from the country in 1978 while awaiting sentence for having sex with a 13-year-old girl. But, in a first for a British libel trial, he was allowed to give video evidence from Paris, where he lives with his present wife, the French actress Emmanuelle Seigner.
Polanski brought the case after being told by Vanity Fair that although it was willing to publish a letter setting out his position about what had happened at Elaine’s, it would not publish an apology, and ”stood by its story”.
The magazine subsequently conceded that it had got the timing wrong — the incident had not taken place when Polanski was on his way back to Hollywood for Tate’s funeral but, it alleged, about two weeks later, on his return to London via New York.
Nevertheless, it maintained that the anecdote was substantially true and that, in any case, Polanski should not receive damages as his reputation had already been ruined by his 1977 conviction and libertine sexual past, which he had gone to great lengths to publicise in a 1984 autobiography confessing to numerous casual sexual encounters, including having had sex four weeks after Tate’s death.
However, Polanski described the alleged romancing of the model in Elaine’s as an ”abominable lie”, saying that at the time he had been consumed by grief for Tate, and that the allegation amounted to an accusation of ”callous indifference” towards her memory.
During the trial Polanski was backed by both Tate’s younger sister, Debra, and the actress Mia Farrow, who had accompanied him to Elaine’s that night and who swore on a ”stack of Bibles” that the incident supposedly witnessed by Lapham had never occurred.
As the verdict was announced, Debra Tate smiled and thanked the jury, while Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, shook his head in disbelief.
In a statement afterwards, Polanski said: ”It goes without saying that whilst the whole episode is a sad one, I am obviously pleased with the jury’s verdict.
”Three years of my life have been interrupted. Three years within which I have had no choice but to relive the horrible events of August 1969, the murders of my wife, my unborn child and my friends.
”Many untruths have been published about me, most of which I have ignored, but the allegations printed in the July 2002 edition of Vanity Fair could not go unchallenged.”
It is understood that Condé Nast faces a costs bill unofficially estimated at up to £1,5-million.
The judge, Justice Eady, ordered that £175 000 in costs should be paid on account by the publisher within 14 days.
Outside court, Carter said: ”I find it amazing that a man who lives in France can sue a magazine that is published in America in a British courtroom.
”As a father of four children, one of whom is a 12-year-old daughter, I find it equally outrageous that this story is considered defamatory, given the fact that Polanski cannot be here because he slept with a 13-year-old girl a quarter of a century ago.”
During the five-day trial, Vanity Fair called both Lapham, now the editor of New York’s Harper‘s magazine, and Edward Perlberg, a retired Wall Street asset manager who had brought the young model, Beatte Telle, to Elaine’s.
In the article, Lapham had said that Polanski’s entrance was the ”only time I ever saw people gasp in Elaine’s”. But under cross-examination by Polanski’s barrister, John Kelsey-Fry, Lapham admitted that the supposed gasp in the restaurant had actually been more of a ”hushed silence”.
Kelsey-Fry also drew the admission that neither Lapham, who in 1999 had written a satirical guide to the art of gossip entitled Rules of Influence, nor Perlberg had actually seen Polanski’s hand ”inside” Telle’s thigh, and that neither of the men had been sufficiently appalled by Polanski’s behaviour at the time to offer to defend Telle’s honour. Telle was also Norwegian, not Swedish.
Opening the case, Kelsey-Fry had conceded that Polanski’s 1978 conviction in the US was an ”unsightly blot”. However, he argued that the key issue was not his client’s admitted ”laissez faire” attitude to casual sex, but Vanity Fair‘s ”monstrous lie”.
The final nail in Vanity Fair‘s story, he suggested in his summing up, was its failure to call Telle to testify — the woman whose modesty had supposedly been invaded and who is still living in Norway.
Outside court, Vanity Fair‘s lawyer, David Hooper, pointed out that the filmmaker would still be ”out of pocket”, as a large portion of the costs of the case were accounted for by the legal arguments which preceded the law lords’ decision in February to allow Polanski to give evidence by videolink.
He had also earlier dropped from his action a claim that Vanity Fair had libelled him in another article in 1997.
In the end, though, in choosing to stand by what Kelsey-Fry called its ”lurid anecdote”, Vanity Fair, a magazine whose trade is gossip — albeit high-falutin’ Hollywood gossip — may have been hoist with its own petard.
In his Rules of Influence, Lapham warns: ”Don’t make the mistake of thinking gossip trivial or unimportant … by attempting too elaborate a narrative, you run the risk of getting it wrong.” – Guardian Unlimited