Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski has refused to be extradited from Switzerland to the US over a 1977 underage sex case in Los Angeles, the filmmaker’s lawyer said yesterday.
“He has refused the request from the United States for his extradition,” said a statement issued by the 76-year-old director’s lawyer Herve Temime, two days after he was detained in Switzerland on a US warrant.
The detention of the Polish-French director as he arrived to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich film festival has turned into an international controversy for Switzerland.
PHOTO: EPA
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner called the arrest “sinister.”
One Swiss newspaper said the country should be “ashamed” of the “trap” it laid for the Oscar-winning director of Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist.
Polanski, who pleaded guilty three decades ago to having sex with a 13-year-old girl, has been held since Saturday.
The Swiss Justice Ministry said it was now waiting for a US extradition request.
“We will be demanding that he be freed. Then we will fight the extradition,” Temine told France’s Le Figaro daily.
“Humanly, it seems to me unbearable that more than 30 years after the incident a man of 76 who obviously poses no danger to society and whose artistic and personal reputation are clearly established, should spend a single day in prison,” he said.
Polanski fled the US in 1978 before sentencing on a charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. He has never returned, even missing the Oscar award for The Pianist in 2003.
Temine said Polanski visits Switzerland often and owns a chalet in Gstaad.
“To the best of my knowledge, the United States is the only country he abstains from visiting,” he said.
A Swiss justice ministry spokesman said Polanski was being held under an international request issued by the USs in 2005.
As Polanski can appeal against any extradition decision, a final decision could take weeks or months, legal experts said.
Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, said moves to detain the director were set in motion last week.
“It wasn’t a big secret that he was going to be in Zurich,” Gibbons said. “They had announced he was going on the Internet.”
Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Wildmer-Schlumpf said her country had to act on the US request and there was no political “pressure” involved.
There was “no other solution” but to arrest Polanski, she said.
But France and Poland have expressed indignation over the arrest. Kouchner said he was working with Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski to help Polanski and that they had jointly written to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to ask for the charges to be dropped.
“This affair is frankly a bit sinister. Here is a man of such talent, recognized worldwide, recognised especially in the country where he was arrested. This is not nice at all,” Kouchner told France-Inter.
French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand has called the arrest of the filmmaker, who lives in Paris, “absolutely horrifying.”
“We know the conditions that this happened in, and while there is a generous America that we like, there is also a side of America which scares and that side has just showed us its face,” Mitterrand said.
A petition signed by filmmakers and actors including Costa Gavras, Wong Kar Wai (王家衛), Monica Bellucci and Fanny Ardant voiced dismay at Polanski’s detention.
“It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him,” the petition said.
At the festival, posters with “Free Polanski” or “No extradition” were plastered in front of the cinema, with the planned retrospective in Polanski’s honor going ahead, albeit without the award ceremony.
In May, a Los Angeles judge refused Polanski’s bid to dismiss the underage sex case after he failed to appear in court.
Polanski’s legal team argued that the conviction should be annulled because the judge who heard the 1970s case had improperly colluded with prosecutors. The judge has since died.
The woman named as the victim in the 1977 case has joined defense lawyers in urging the dismissal of the case. Samantha Geimer, now a 45-year-old mother of three, said that Polanski asked her mother if he could photograph her for a fashion magazine at the Hollywood Hills home of Jack Nicholson in March 1977.
Geimer said that after plying her with champagne and drugs and taking nude pictures, Polanski had sex despite her resistance and requests to be taken home.
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