Convicted child rapist and fugitive Roman Polanski, 88, gets the VIP TREATMENT at Rolling Stones concert
Roman Polanski made a rare appearance for the first time in years at a Rolling Stones concert in Paris on Saturday, July 23, as Los Angeles prosecutors looked back at his 45-year-old rape case.
Polanski, 88, was accompanied by his 56-year-old wife, the French actress Emmanuelle Seigner. The couple, who got married in 1989, was seen walking through the Hippodrome de Longchamp while wearing clothing with VIP stickers, Daily Mail reported.
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Polanski has multiple sexual misconduct allegations and ongoing legal issues against him since 1978 after he escaped from the US while awaiting sentence after pleading guilty to having unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl. He has long maintained that the judge broke his promise not to imprison him and that he was the victim of judicial misconduct.
In 1977, Polanski was charged with drugging and raping then 13 years old girl Samantha Geimer. It was only when Geimer came forward to identify herself publicly and told police he drugged her champagne and forced himself on her in Jack Nicholson's house, Polanski acknowledged having sex with the minor. Polanski agreed to plead guilty in exchange for the prosecution dropping drug, rape, and sodomy charges after she declined to testify in court.
Court records from the case were finally made public last week after years of secrecy, and they appeared to support Polanski's assertion that the judge acted improperly. Now, Polanski and his legal team are arguing that he should be sentenced in absentia, ending his years-long status as a wanted man. He was expecting Judge Laurence Rittenband to sentence him to probation in 1978, but he learned just before the hearing that the judge would jail him for up to 120 days instead.
At Jack Nicholson's home in 1977, 13-year-old Samantha Geimer alleged to police that Polanski spiked her champagne and coerced her into having sex with him. Rittenband, who passed away in 1993, claimed he needed to be sterner with the movie director, who was 45 at the time because he had been influenced by the media. He guaranteed to have him released from prison in less than 120 days, but Polanski fled to France out of resentment over their broken promise. Since then, he has resisted attempts to extradite him to the US as a wanted person or have him sentenced in absentia. He has remained in Europe.
The case is being reviewed
The LA District Attorney's office has ringfenced the case for decades, but it is currently being reviewed. A request from journalists to make the documents public led to the recent unsealing of hundreds of pages of testimony from former Deputy District Attorney Roger Gunson. All parties involved support the request; Geimer, 59, wants the case dismissed, and Polanski wanted them made public to demonstrate judicial misconduct.
Last week, LA DA George Gascon agreed that the documents should be unsealed after initially opposing efforts to make them public like his predecessors. According to one of his advisors, the case has been under suspicion for 40 years and has been ordered to be unsealed by the Los Angeles-based California Court of Appeals.
In 2010, at the request of Polanski's legal counsel, Gunson provided the testimony. He had unspecified health problems at the time, which Polanski's team feared might prevent him from testifying in the future if the case was ever reopened. The testimony appears to support Polanski's assertion that the judge acted improperly and demonstrates how almost everyone involved—including the prosecutors, Polanski, and the victim—was unhappy.
Polanski's attorneys fighting to end his fugitive status
To end his current status as a fugitive, Polanski's attorneys are arguing for him to be sentenced in absentia. They want him to receive a sentence for time served. Geimer wants the case to be dismissed after winning $600,000 from Polanski in a civil settlement.
In 1978, Rittenband sentenced Polanski to 90 days in state prison. The prison recommended that the director of the movie not serve any additional time after he had been there for 42 days for a psychiatric evaluation. The prosecutor, Gunson, claimed Rittenband told Polanski's team he would sentence him to 120 days in prison but would let him out sooner because he believed the recommendation was a "whitewash."
Gunson admitted in his testimony that because there was no predetermined sentence, the judge could sentence Polanski to up to 50 years in prison. In a panic, Polanski ran away.
Despite Geimer's repeated requests to unseal the documents and drop the case, prosecutors have previously pointed to Geimer as their justification for the secrecy. In order to persuade a judge to drop "a 40-year sentence which has been imposed on the victim of a crime as well as the perpetrator," she flew from her home in Hawaii to Los Angeles in 2017. "As a mercy to myself and my family, I beg you to think about doing something to finally end this situation," Geimer had said.
Geimer wrote a memoir titled "The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski" and went public with it years ago. On the cover is a picture that Polanski took. She begged Gascon to consent to the documents being unsealed last month.
The courts have referred to the case as one of the longest-running sagas in California's history of criminal justice. The documents were then mandated to be made public by the California Appeals Court.