A Los Angeles judge privately told lawyers he would break a promise and jail Roman Polanski for sexually abusing a 13-year-old girl in 1977, a former prosecutor said, paving the way for the renowned director to flee the United States as a fugitive.
A previously sealed transcript obtained by the Associated Press late Sunday of retired assistant district attorney Roger Gunson’s testimony supports Polanski’s claim that he fled on the eve of sentencing in 1978 because he didn’t think he was getting a fair deal.
Gunson said during testimony behind closed doors in 2010 that the judge broke a promise to release Polanski after state prison officials decided he should not serve a hard time.
“The judge had promised him something on two occasions … something he didn’t keep,” Gunson said. “So it wasn’t surprising to me that he couldn’t or wouldn’t trust the judge when he was told he was going to be sent to state prison.”
Polanski’s victim testified before a grand jury that during a photo shoot at Jack Nicholson’s home in March 1977, when the actor was not home, Polanski gave her champagne and some of a sedative and then forced her to have sex. The girl said she didn’t fight him because she was afraid of him, but her mother later called the police.
When the girl refused to testify in court, Polanski pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor in exchange for prosecutors dropping the drug, rape, and bestiality charges. Since then she has been demanding an end to the process.
Defense attorney Harland Braun said Friday – pending the release of the transcript – that the development would renew his efforts to try Polanski in absentia, which would end his fugitive status.
Braun has previously tried unsuccessfully, with prosecutors claiming and judges agreeing that Polanski must appear in Los Angeles Superior Court to resolve the matter.
The release of the transcript, ordered Wednesday by a California appeals court after Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón dropped longstanding objections by his predecessors to its release, may bolster Polanski’s claims that he is being prosecuted by a corrupt judge .
The legal saga has played out on both sides of the Atlantic as a recurring scene over four decades of a life marred by tragedy as well as triumph.
As a child, Polanski fled the Kraków ghetto during the Holocaust. His wife, Sharon Tate, was among seven people murdered by supporters of Charles Manson in 1969.
Polanski, 88, who was nominated for an Academy Award for Chinatown in 1974 and Tess in 1979, won the 2003 statuette for best director for The Pianist. But he couldn’t accept it because he was threatened with arrest in the United States.
France, Switzerland and Poland all turned down offers to extradite him to the US and he continues to be celebrated in Europe, receiving praise and working with great actors. However, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences disqualified him from its membership in 2018 after the #MeToo movement sparked a reckoning of sexual misconduct.
Polanski has argued that there was judicial misconduct in his case. In 2010, a Los Angeles court took a sealed testimony from Gunson about his memories of promises the judge made to the director in 1977.
Polanski’s attorneys, who were in the room during Gunson’s testimony but could not use it in court, have long sought to unseal this transcript to help her case.
The late Judge Laurence Rittenband was influenced by the public in the case and changed his mind several times about the sentence Polanski should face, Braun said.
After a report from parole officers that Polanski should not be serving time behind bars, Rittenband sent the warden to the state prison for a 90-day diagnostic exam to determine what sentence he should face.
The judge said as long as Polanski receives a favorable report from the prison, he will not serve any additional time, Gunson said. After a six-week investigation in prison, Polanski was released with a recommendation that he serve only on parole, Braun said.
But Rittenband thought the parole and jail reports were superficial and a “palliation,” said Gunson, who agreed they downplayed or misrepresented Polanski’s crimes.
The judge told Gunson and Polanski’s attorney privately that he needed to toughen up the criticism in the news media.
He said he would send Polanski to prison longer but then release him within 120 days, which was possible under the penal code of the time.
“Roman says, ‘How can I trust the judge who lied twice?’ So he takes off for Europe,” said Braun.
Gunson admitted during testimony that the judge could, at his discretion, sentence Polanski to up to 50 years in prison because there was no agreed sentence. But Gunson objected to the “sham trial” the judge orchestrated and felt he had broken promises to Polanski.
The victim, Samantha Geimer, has long pleaded for the case to be dropped or for Polanski to be tried in absentia. She went so far as to travel to Los Angeles from her home in Hawaii five years ago to urge a judge to “end a 40-year sentence that was inflicted on both the victim of a crime and the offender.”
“I beseech you to take action to finally end this matter as an act of mercy to me and my family,” Geimer said.
Geimer went public years ago and wrote a memoir called The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski. The cover shows a photo of Polanski.
Polanski agreed to pay Geimer over $600,000 to settle a lawsuit in 1993.
Geimer, who was pushing for an investigation into judicial misconduct, asked for the record to be unsealed and last month urged the prosecutor’s office to reconsider the case.
Prosecutors have consistently opposed the material’s release, but relented earlier this week to accommodate Geimer’s wishes and be transparent with the public.
“This case has been described by the courts as ‘one of the longest-running sagas in the history of the California criminal justice system,'” Gascón said in a statement. “For years, this agency has fought against the release of information that the victim and the public have a right to know.”
However, the DA did not indicate that Polanski could avoid appearing in court. release said Polanski remains a fugitive and should face the court for sentencing.