Hardcore haters of Roman Polanski gonna hate no matter what, but it suddenly appears as if the decades-old rape case against the 88 year-old director might be dropped before long.
THR‘s Winston Cho reported earlier today that the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office “is no longer opposing a request to unseal a former prosecutor’s testimony that Polanski claims will reveal misconduct from [the late Judge Lawrence J. Rittenband], thus warranting dismissal of the decades-old case against him.”
This means that transcripts of closed-door testimony from the original prosecutor handling the case, Roger Gunson, who retired in 2002, will soon be unsealed. This could lead to Polanski being allowed to return to the United States if it’s found that Rittenbrand improperly reneged on the plea deal Polanski’s attorneys allegedly struck with prosecutors over 90 days of psychiatric evaluation.
Excerpt from “The Roman Arena” (’09), written by Phil Nugent:
“Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired has an irresistible story to tell: much of the second half is narrated by the lawyers involved, including the prosecutor David Wells, and their accounts match.
“The villain is the late Judge Lawrence J. Rittenband, a publicity addict who was mainly concerned with how the show…excuse me, I mean the trial, was playing out in the media.
“The title Wanted and Desired comes from a witness to the circus who notes the striking difference between the European reporters who saw Polanski as an important cultural figure and the American TV crews and journalists, who saw him as a malignant dwarf who had come for our women — and Zenovich makes the point that this view was so strong even at the start of Polanski’s Hollywood career that, in the wake of his wife’s murder, the media often treated the director as if he might be complicit in the killings, or at least as if he had somehow brought it on himself by making sicko movies like Rosemary’s Baby.
“According to the lawyers, Rittenband actually called them into his chambers and told them what parts he wanted them to play in scenes that he wanted to act out in the courtroom for the media.
“Ultimately, he agreed, as his little secret with Polanski and the lawyers, to force Polanski to spend a maximum of ninety days in a maximum security prison receiving ‘psychiatric evaluation.’
“Again, according to the lawyers, it was understood that this would be Polanski’s sentence, and that after it was over, he’d be given probation. If true, this would mean that Polanski, for all practical purposes, had already served his sentence when he went on the lam, and both the prosecution team and the psychiatric experts were good with it. But after the shrinks decided that Polanski had had enough and he was turned loose after 42 days, the media decided that he wasn’t showing sufficient public remorse, and Rittenband, upset by the bad press, informed the lawyers that he’d changed his mind and was going to throw the book at the little bastard.
“Gunson recalls that, after that mind-blower, Polanski’s lawyer asked him how he could explain this to his client, and Gunson, to his regret, he says, replied that if Polanski were his own client, he might just tell him to hop the next plane out of Rittenband’s magic kingdom.
“In the wake of Wanted and Desired, Polanski’s lawyers made a motion to have the case against him dropped. They were quickly followed by an effort by the woman Polanski raped [Samantha Geimer] to drop the charges, saying that the lingering ‘attention’ the case still generated “is not pleasant to experience and is not worth maintaining over some irrelevant legal nicety, the continuation of the case.
“The let’s-drop-this-thing movement ultimately foundered because Polanski refused to return to the U.S. He didn’t trust the District Attorney’s office, and in light of recent events, he may have had the right idea.
“It’s hard for even a conspiracy-phobe like myself not to conclude that what made this case an A-list priority after all this time is that Roman Polanski’s real crime is that he ran away, thrived, and in the process made the law look ridiculous.
“And then, having done all that, he even had the audacity to feel them out about getting his name cleared so that he could visit their fine city again and, after they tried to save face by imposing some restrictions of their own, like asking him to actually show up in a courtroom, walked away again, saying, no — my life’s good, it’s not really that important to me.”
