Film director Roman Polanski, arrested in Zurich over a United States charge of having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977, will fight extradition to the US, his lawyer was quoted as saying on Monday.
Polanski, who fled the US in 1978, was detained on Saturday after arriving to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival. It was not clear why US authorities had chosen this moment to act on Polanski (76), a regular visitor to Switzerland with a house here.
”We are going to demand his release and we are going to defend ourselves against the reasons for the extradition procedure,” Herve Temime, Polanski’s lawyer, told French daily Le Figaro.
”It seems indefensible that 30 years after the fact a 76-year-old man who has shown no evidence of any danger to society and whose reputation … is well established, can spend a single day in prison,” Temime said.
Temime said he was travelling to Zurich with Polanski’s wife, French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, who he said was very shocked by the arrest.
Los Angeles County District Attorney spokesperson Sandi Gibbons said on Sunday her office sent a provisional arrest warrant to the Swiss on learning Polanski would be in Zurich.
Polanski, a French citizen, has avoided countries that have extradition treaties with the US. He has never returned to Los Angeles, where his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was murdered by followers of Charles Manson in 1969.
The US authorities have up to 60 days to make a firm extradition request, but Polanski can appeal to the Swiss Federal Court of Justice against the arrest and extradition.
A spokesperson for the court said it had not yet received any request in relation to the Polanski case.
Polanski was initially arrested in the US in 1977 and charged with giving drugs and alcohol to the minor and having unlawful sex with her.
The director maintained the girl was sexually experienced and consented. Polanski spent 42 days in prison undergoing psychiatric tests and eventually agreed to plead guilty and receive a sentence of time served.
But Polanski fled the US on the eve of his 1978 sentencing because he believed a judge might overrule his plea and put him in jail for 50 years.
His victim Samantha Geimer of Hawaii has said Polanski should not face any jail time, while his lawyers tried and failed earlier this year to have the case dismissed after a 2008 documentary prompted new questions of judicial misconduct.
Petition for release by artists
Franco-Greek film director Costa Gavras, the director of France’s foremost film institute the Cinematheque, said he had signed a petition along with many others from the movie profession demanding that Polanski be freed immediately.
”Everyone is furious about this thing and this petition will be signed by thousands of people,” he told French radio station Europe 1. ”A man of this quality can’t just be arrested 30 years after an old rehashed story. He must absolutely be set free.”
French media reported that Italian actress Monica Bellucci, French actress Fanny Ardant, president of the Cannes film festival Gilles Jacob and Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai were among the signatories of the petition.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner also denounced the arrest: ”It’s a bit sinister, this business, to be quite frank,” Kouchner told France Inter radio. ”A man of such talent, recognised throughout the world … All this is not nice.”
Born to Polish-Jewish parents on August 18 1933, he spent the first three years of his life in Paris before the family returned to Poland. He escaped when the Germans sealed off the Krakow Jewish ghetto but his mother later died at Auschwitz.
Polanski scored a huge hit in the US with 1968 horror thriller Rosemary’s Baby, and another with 1974’s Chinatown, a stylish thriller starring Jack Nicholson that was nominated for 11 Academy Awards.
Tess (1979) also earned him an Oscar nomination, and Polanski finally won his only best director Oscar for 2002 film The Pianist, the story of a Jewish-Polish musician who sees his world collapse with the outbreak of World War II. — Reuters