The Celebrity Defense - The New Yorker“Roman is not defeated by anything,” a friend says. The document recounted how patrol officers had gone to the home of Samantha Gailey, a thirteen- year- old girl who lived in the San Fernando Valley, after her mother called police to say that Samantha had been raped by Roman Polanski, the movie director, who was forty- four at the time.“In those days, I was too busy raising kids and paying bills to go to many movies,” Vannatter recalled recently. According to Vannatter, “The prosecutor decided that we should go to the hotel where Polanski was staying and execute a search warrant”—to find, among other things, photographs of Gailey that she said Polanski had taken and quaalude pills like the one she said the director had given her. I was very unhappy when I heard about that. I thought we had plenty of evidence to arrest him, and that’s what I thought we should do.”So, in the early evening, Vannatter and his partner went to the Beverly Wilshire hotel, in Beverly Hills, where Polanski was staying. I thought, The heck with this. I wasn’t going to let those D. A. s tell me how to do my job. Why not arrest the guy? Any other person would have been arrested. So I said I’m going to do what is right.“After I read him his rights, I asked him to take me upstairs to his room, so I could do the search,” Vannatter went on. So I put my hand under his and said, . He kept asking me for the quaalude back, so he could take it and calm down,” Vannatter said. On March 2. 4, 1. Los Angeles County grand jury indicted Polanski on six felony counts, including rape by use of drugs and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor. On August 8, 1. 97. Polanski pleaded guilty to the least serious of the charges against him, having unlawful sex with a minor—statutory rape. On the eve of his sentencing hearing, which was scheduled for February 1, 1. Polanski fled to Europe, and he has not returned. Earlier this year, on September 2. Switzerland after American authorities made a provisional request for his arrest. Last week, Polanski’s lawyers provided the deed to his apartment in Paris, the final piece of security to raise $4. Under the terms of the arrangement, Polanski was then released to house arrest at his chalet, known as Milky Way, in the Swiss ski resort of Gstaad, having spent sixty- seven days in a Zurich detention center. The large amount of bail, and a requirement for him to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet, might seem extreme for a seventy- six- year- old man; but, considering that Polanski is one of the most famous fugitives from American justice in the world, his release from prison under any terms at all may seem like a generous deal for him.“Sorry. He’s been cursing like that ever since we put him in that little sailor suit.”The question of whether Polanski’s celebrity has helped or hurt him hovers over his lengthy legal battle. For Vannatter, the lesson in Polanski’s long flight from justice is that celebrities enjoy special privileges in the legal system—a subject on which he possesses a unique vantage point. Seventeen years after arresting Polanski, Vannatter, with his partner Tom Lange, led the investigation of the murder of O. Simpson’s ex- wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. Polanski has enjoyed a comfortable exile in Europe, where until this year he not only avoided prison but continued to make films. PREVENTING CRIME: WHAT WORKS, WHAT DOESN'T, WHAT'S PROMISING 1. A REPORT TO THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS. Prepared for the National Institute of Justice.Note from KTVB 18/1/17: I found this entry I started in March 2015 but never finished or published. So here I am giving it a chance to surface on my blog, hope you enjoy! Get exclusive film and movie reviews from THR, the leading source of film reviews online. We take an honest look at the best and worst movies Hollywood has to offer. This is the Drama section for TV in the United Kindom. We start off on this page with OLDTIMETV SERIES DRAMAS UK, then at the top, above the great Lucille Balls head. Directed by John Singleton. With Janet Jackson, Tupac Shakur, Regina King, Joe Torry. In this film, we see the world through the eyes of main character Justice, a. ![]() For decades, his conviction for a felony sex crime existed mostly as a footnote in a long and eventful life. But the Polanski story suggests an alternative view, too. Over the years, there have also been times when he has been penalized for his celebrity status. Mostly, celebrity warps the criminal process, and not always in a predictable direction. In Polanski’s case, the effect of his celebrity was doubly, and inconsistently, pernicious; it obscured both how badly Polanski treated his young victim and how badly the legal system treated him. Polanski’s period of house arrest will mark a return to an alpine village that has long been a favorite escape for him. Friends of Polanski brought him to Gstaad to help him recover from his grief over the murder of Sharon Tate. On that visit, in the late sixties, Polanski discovered that Gstaad was, he wrote in an autobiography, “the finishing school capital of the world . They were all between sixteen and nineteen years old. They took to visiting my chalet, not necessarily to make love—though some of them did—but to listen to rock music and sit around the fire and talk.” He described sitting in his car outside the schools at night, waiting for his “date” to climb out over the balcony after roll call. At this age, Polanski wrote, the girls “were more beautiful, in a natural, coltish way, than they ever would be again.” The autobiography, “Roman, by Polanski,” was published in 1. While exile and tragedy have been persistent themes in Polanski’s life, so, too, has a sexual obsession with very young women. He started dating the actress Nastassja Kinski when he was in his mid- forties and she was in her mid- teens. He has been together with his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, since he was fifty- one and she was eighteen. And then, of course, there is the criminal case involving thirteen- year- old Samantha Gailey. In his autobiography, he wrote of the day that Vannatter arrested him, “I was incredulous; I couldn’t equate what had happened that day with rape in any form.” In an interview two years after the crime, with Martin Amis, Polanski spoke in even blunter terms: “When I was being driven to the police station from the hotel, the car radio was already talking about it. I thought, you know, I was going to wake up from it. I realize, if I have killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls—everyone wants to fuck young girls!”Roman Polanski has led the kind of life that has already called forth multiple biographies. He was born in Paris in 1. His father, a Jewish . After Hitler’s invasion, the family was confined to the city’s ghetto. His mother, four months pregnant, was taken to Auschwitz and gassed; his father was carried off, too, but somehow survived. On March 1. 4, 1. Germans completed the liquidation of the ghetto. There is no bitterness, no anger, though there is memory,” Jeff Berg, his longtime agent, who spoke to Polanski while he was jailed, told me. He is neither in denial nor apologetic about his life. He wouldn’t use the word, but it’s a very existential approach to life.” Polanski’s early life seems to have instilled in him a voraciousness for experience—intellectual, physical, sexual. Amid the deprivations of postwar Poland, the young Polanski became an accomplished actor, skier, bicycle racer, fencer, mimic, and artist. Summer camp changed his life. I had discovered my vocation.”“The answer isn’t more troops—what you need is an antibiotic.”In the early fifties, Polanski joined the threadbare Polish film community in Lodz. He made a handful of experimental shorts. His first full- length feature was “Knife in the Water,” a dark, atmospheric drama about a married couple who pick up a young stranger on the way to an excursion on their boat. It earned Polanski an Academy Award nomination in 1. Best Foreign Language Film. After Polanski rejected Bart’s initial requests that he direct the movie version, Bart asked his boss at Paramount, Robert Evans, to intervene. If you come to L. A., the worst thing that can happen is that you are going to have the best sex of your life.’ Roman said, . He loved the fast life. He became a real star. He got good tables in restaurants. That had not been part of his life. You could see him change, to a degree. The unthinkable happened to Roman—he was actually happy.”Polanski even found a woman he loved, a young actress named Sharon Tate, and they married on January 2. When Tate was pregnant with their first child, she and Polanski rented a house on the quiet and remote Cielo Drive. It was shortly before dinner on August 9, 1. Polanski, who was in London, received the phone call. His maid had found the bodies: Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant; Jay Sebring, a Hollywood hair stylist; Wojtek Frykowski, a friend of Polanski’s from Poland; and Abigail Folger, Frykowski’s girlfriend and an heiress to the Folger coffee fortune. The word “PIG” was written in Tate’s blood on the front door. For months, the crime was unsolved, and it became the subject of a torrent of speculation, with some insinuations directed at Polanski. Time noted that “Sharon and Polanski circulated in one of the film world’s more offbeat crowds.” The innuendo wounded Polanski, who assisted the police, and offered a reward for leads. Finally, on December 1st, the police announced that the case had been solved. Most of the Manson “family” members who had conducted the attacks were already in custody. Manson had no connection to Polanski, or to any of the victims.“Sharon’s death is the only watershed in my life that really matters,” Polanski wrote. A little later, his friend Robert Evans asked him to direct a script, by Robert Towne, about the murky origins of modern Los Angeles. Polanski was reluctant, but Evans courted him by hosting a Passover Seder, with Kirk Douglas presiding and Sidney Korshak, the mob fixer, arranging the catering. Polanski agreed to direct “Chinatown.” That film, which came out in 1. Polanski his next Academy Award nomination. He shot “The Tenant,” a thriller in which he also starred, in Paris, and directed “Rigoletto” at the Bavarian State Opera, in Munich. In his autobiography, Polanski recounted an evening in Munich in late 1. At Polanski’s hotel suite, the journalist stayed with his date, whom Polanski knew only as “Nasty,” and “I took the other girl, a stunning blonde, to bed. By the time I surfaced the journalist had gone. Nasty was half- asleep in an armchair in the sitting room. Taking her by the hand, I led her back into the bedroom.
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