Film director under house arrest and facing extradition to US 'overwhelmed' by worldwide messages of sympathy

• Lizzy Davies in Paris
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 28 December 2009 13.31 GMT
• Article history

Roman Polanski: 'How heartening it is, when one is locked up in a cell, to hear this murmur of human voices and of solidarity in the morning post.' Photograph: Roberto Pfeil/AP

Roman Polanski, the Oscar-winning film director under house arrest on charges of having sex with a 13-year-old girl, has expressed his gratitude to his supporters in an open letter to the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy.

In his first public comments on the case since he was placed in detention in September, the director said he had been "overwhelmed" by the messages of sympathy he had received from "across the world. I would like every one of them to know how heartening it is, when one is locked up in a cell, to hear this murmur of human voices and of solidarity in the morning post," he wrote in the letter. "In the darkest moments, each of their notes has been a source of comfort and hope, and they continue to be so in my current situation."

The 76-year-old, who jumped US bail in 1978 after admitting having sex with a minor, was finally re-arrested at the request of US authorities in September. Instead of picking up the lifetime achievement award he had been promised at a Swiss film festival, he found himself behind bars in Winterthur, near Zurich.

Earlier this month he was released on bail and has been spending the Christmas season with his family at his Alpine chalet in the ski resort of Gstaad. Authorities have indicated that a decision on his extradition to the US will be made in the new year.

In France, where Polanski spent much of his time as a fugitive, the arrest of such a luminary sparked horror among the artistic elite. A French petition demanding his immediate release was signed by hundreds of industry figures including Martin Scorsese and David Lynch.

While others have back-pedalled on their initial support in the face of mounting public revulsion, Levy, the Left Bank philosopher, has been one of the "genius director's" most vocal defenders.

"I have not moved one iota," he told Le Parisien newspaper in an interview on Saturday. "This arrest was a disgrace. This detention was, and still is, a disgrace. This climate of popular justice and lynching … is still a disgrace."

In his letter, the Franco-Polish director thanked Levy for having "supported [him] from the very first day". He asked for his message to be put up on the internet as a means of thanking all the "unknown friends" who, he said, had sent him words of comfort during his arrest.

Jacques Vallee is a computer scientist, partner in a venture capital firm, and author of more than 20 books, including Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, The Invisible College, and The Network Revolution.

In our age of rational science the occult has never been more in demand: Angels and demons are popular, the Da Vinci code and lost symbols fascinate audiences worldwide and Hollywood is eager to turn out more movies with a paranormal theme. So why is it that so many of these stories seem flat, and fail to reach the level of insight into hidden structures of the world true esoteric adventures are supposed to promise?

Perhaps the answer has to do with the failure of gifted directors to come to grips with the enormity of the unknown issues of human destiny, or to pose the fundamental questions their esoteric subject would demand. We go away charmed by artistic visions, dazzled by the pageantry of cardinals in red capes and titillated by women in black garters but the Illuminati only scare us because of the blood they spill, not the existential issues they should transcend. They behave like any other gang of thugs, even if they utter their rough curses in Latin rather than street slang, cockney or modern Italian.

The circumstances that made this point clear to me arose when I watched again two movies within a few days, namely Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate.

I was struck by the suspicious similarities and the enormous differences between them. In earlier viewings both had thrilled me with the superb photography, the great acting, and the expansive landscapes. A second experience made me wonder about the themes themselves: the contrast was striking. The story line of Eyes wide shut turns out to be not only unbelievable but downright silly. It could be summed up as "Handsome young millionaire doctor tries to get laid in New York for three days and fails!" In the process he has joined a fake black mass and deciphered a few facile occult clues but there is no point to any of it. I do understand that Kubrick, like Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum, was attempting to say something profound about magic and eroticism but he only produced clichés, vague references to tired grimoires and gratuitous gropings: those black garter belts again.

The Polanski movie, in contrast, is dangerous and captivating from the very first frame. It combines a profound understanding of hermeticism with the breathless beauty of a quest for infinity. It completes it with the exquisite aesthetics of an adept who knows what should be exposed and what should remain hidden. Polanski has recognized the power and genuineness of his cause, his story, his landscapes, while Kubrick only exemplifies the well-trained academic intellectual who scrutinizes the magical from the outside and just doesn't get it, flashing the conventional symbols before us like so many obligatory props. Occultism is not science-fiction. The splendid photography doesn't fill the emotional gap.

It was striking to me that both movies took the protagonists to very similar situations and to the same places - the region of Pontoise in fact, so charged for me in magical memories. Should we suspect that the scripts circulated from desk to desk in Hollywood, as is so often the case, and that both stories emerged from a bit of plagiarism? Let's not go that far: perhaps it was simply a case of lucky occult coincidence.

US Editor

Published: 23 Nov 2009

LIKE many adopted children, Matthew Roberts set about finding his biological parents with a mix of nerves and excitement.

In particular, he hoped that discovering his father's identity would help him to work out what made him the man he had become.

But nothing could have prepared him for being told his dad was... serial killer CHARLES MANSON.

 

Warped ... Charles Manson now

 

Over a five-week period in the summer of 1969, Manson and his Family of commune followers committed a series of nine gruesome murders. Victims included pregnant actress Sharon Tate, wife of film director Roman Polanski.

Matthew, 41 - who bears a haunting resemblance to his father - sank into depression after discovering his identity.

He has since been in contact with his dad in a series of letters to his California prison and Manson has replied - each time chillingly signing off with a swastika.

Now Matthew, who was given up for adoption as a baby, has told of his horror at finding out he was the son of a monster.

 

Poison pen ... letter from Manson to Matthew

 

He says: "I didn't want to believe it. I was frightened and angry. It's like finding out that Adolf Hitler is your father.

"I'm a peaceful person - trapped in the face of a monster."

Matthew grew up in Rockford, Illinois, and didn't know he was adopted until his sister told him when he was ten.

He loved his adoptive parents but always knew he was different. He says: "My parents were great people, but very conservative.

"They were products of the Fifties and I didn't relate to them. My biological parents were products of the Sixties and I take on a lot more of those characteristics."

He also reveals his adoptive father tried to discourage him from getting in contact with Manson, telling him: "Nothing good will come from this."

Letters

Matthew, who now lives in Los Angeles, began investigating his family history 12 years ago when he contacted a social services agency who located his mother, Terry, in Wisconsin.

He wrote to her straight away and their early exchanges will be familiar to adopted children everywhere.

 

Map ... Los Angeles

 

She confirmed she was his mum and told him she had named him Lawrence Alexander - and that she would tell him his last name in time.

The jigsaw of his life was beginning to take shape but it was still missing a crucial piece - his father.

Terry remained tight-lipped about his identity but after Matthew pressed her for details in a string of letters, she eventually revealed the awful truth.

She said she met commune leader Manson in 1967 - two years before the infamous "Manson Family" murders in Los Angeles for which he is still in jail at the age of 75.

But back in 1967, Terry had been one of many who were transfixed by Manson's charms.

Her father had tried to chase him away when he met Terry, calling him a "white-trash biker bandit" but she found him charismatic and hypnotizing.

 

So she hopped on a bus with his Family and ended up in San Francisco. There she claims she was raped by Manson in a drug-fuelled orgy, after which she returned home and Matthew was born on March 22, 1968.

 

Cult HQ ... ranch near Death Valley where Manson Family gathered

 

Terry always believed Manson was the father of the baby she gave up for adoption. And after seeing a picture of Matthew, her worst nightmare was confirmed.

For he is the spitting image of Manson, with the same nose, mouth, eyes and large forehead. They even have the same thick, arched eyebrows and long, thick, dark hair.

Like his father, Matthew is a songwriter and poet. He is even worried that he may have inherited his father's schizophrenia.

Matthew, now working as a DJ, recalls hearing mum Terry's bombshell: "She even said, 'You look just like him'.

"I'm not nuts but I've got a little bit of it. It's scary and upsetting. If I get worked up, my eyes get really big and that's really freaked some people out before.

 

Bad sign ... another note from the killer

Splash News

 

"I've tried to tone that down quite a bit. I don't like having that effect on people.

"I don't even like the fact that I'm big. It makes me even scarier. My hero is Gandhi. I'm an extremely non-violent, peaceful person and a vegetarian.

"I don't even kill bugs. I've had long hair all my life. I could make it go away, but I can't let the world and their fears change me." After discovering the truth, it took Matthew five years to pluck up the courage to write to his father at Corcoran State Prison in California.

Manson replied to Matthew's letter straight away and has since sent him a string of ten handwritten notes and postcards signed with the wartime Nazi symbol.

Hobo

Matthew says: "He sends me weird stuff and always signs it with his swastika. At first I was stunned and depressed. I wasn't able to speak for a day. I remember not being able to eat."

 

According to Matthew, the letters mainly rambled and said "crazy things" but Manson did confirm he could be his father.

In one twisted letter he wrote: "The truth is the truth. The truth hurts."

In another note Manson talked about meeting Matthew's mother. He wrote: "I remember her. We came back to LA on the super-cheap train."

And Manson - who grew up without a father figure - even compared his childhood to Matthew's.

He said: "You got the same father I got. A hobo just left on the midnight train and died, lost at sea." Then in a postcard two years ago, addressed to Matthew's birth name Lawrence Alexander, Manson sent his son his prison phone number.

But Matthew has never made the call to his dad.

He says: "There's always a subconscious block.

"What I'm worried about is that you think you're going to meet your birth mother or father and they're going to love you and welcome you with open arms. But he's not that kind of person."

Despite Manson's evil actions, Matthew confesses he now battles confused emotions towards his biological father.

He says: "If I did talk to Charlie on the phone, I would say, 'I truly understand what it's like to be you, more than anyone could ever imagine on so many levels'.

"He's my biological father - I can't help but have some kind of emotional connection. That's the hardest thing of all - feeling love for a monster who raped my mother.

"I don't want to love him, but I don't want to hate him either."

The film-maker has not set foot in the US since 1978

Roman Polanski agreed to pay his victim of sexual assault $500,000, 15 years after he fled the US, according to court documents released to the media.

The French-Polish director is being held in Switzerland on a US arrest warrant over his 1977 conviction for unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl.

The confidential deal between Mr Polanski and the victim, Samantha Geimer, was reached in October 1993.

It was disclosed because of a two-year struggle to get the film-maker to pay.

Mr Polanski - who faces extradition to the US - was detained in Switzerland as he travelled from France to collect a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival.

The last court filing in August 1996 stated that he owed Ms Geimer $604,416.22, including interest. The documents were made available to the media on Friday.

The court records did not reveal whether the 76-year-old director had ever paid, according to the Associated Press.

The director pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with an under-age girl following a plea bargain - he had originally been charged with six offences including rape and sodomy.

Victim sued

He left the US in 1978 before he could be sentenced and has not returned to the country since.

David Finkle, the film-maker's lawyer, said he was unable to recall details of the case and declined comment. Ms Geimer and her family have also been unavailable for comment.

She sued Mr Polanski in December 1988, alleging sexual assault, infliction of emotional distress and seduction.

But in January this year she asked a US court to drop charges against him, saying the continued publication of details "causes harm to me, my husband and children".

Schwarzenegger speaks out

The arrest of Mr Polanski, who won an Oscar in 2002 for The Pianist, a harrowing story of Nazi-occupied Warsaw, has prompted an outcry among some politicians and Hollywood heavyweights.

But on Friday, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said the film-maker should not get special treatment because he is a "big-time movie director".

A petition has been signed by film-makers including Pedro Almodovar and Stephen Frears, and actors including Monica Bellucci and Fanny Ardant, expressing dismay at Mr Polanski's arrest.

Other Hollywood luminaries, including film producer Harvey Weinstein, have called for Mr Polanski's release.

On Tuesday, US prosecutors said the 76-year-old had been on an Interpol "wanted list" for years.

Roman Polanski in 1979, a year after he fled to France. Photograph: Snap/Rex Features

Roman Polanski faces weeks in jail before an appeal against his arrest over a 32-year statutory rape charge is heard in court, Swiss authorities said today.

The federal criminal court said lawyers for the Oscar-winning director had lodged an appeal that would be heard "within the next weeks." Polanksi is expected to be held in custody throughout the appeal and any subsequent challenges from either side.

Peter Cosandey, a former Zurich prosecutor specialising in international criminal cooperation, said: "In most cases, the imprisoned person has to remain in detention for the whole process."

His chances of exemption from custody were rather small, he added, because Polanski was neither a Swiss citizen nor a permanent resident and was considered at high risk of fleeing justice.

Under Swiss law, the US has 60 days to file a formal extradition request. That request must be examined by the justice ministry, and if approved can be appealed at a number of courts.

Although the director, who lives in France, often stayed at a chalet in the wealthy Swiss town of Gstaad and travelled widely in Europe, a Swiss official said this was the first time law enforcement authorities had solid information from the US enabling them to make an arrest.

Polanski is being held in a Zurich cell, where he receives three meals a day and is allowed outside for one hour of daily exercise.

Family and friends can see him for an hour each week, but that restriction does not apply to official visits from lawyers and consular diplomats. Polanski has met his wife, French actress Emmanuelle Seigner.

The justice ministry has insisted that politics played no role in its arrest order for Polanski.

Last night, US prosecutors revealed details of their 31-year international hunt for the film director before he was seized in Switzerland at the weekend.

After criticism about the timing of the arrest, the Los Angeles county district attorney's office issued a detailed chronology of its efforts bring Polanski to justice after his admission of sex with an underage girl.

It first attempted to have Polanski extradited from the UK in May 1978 after learning that he may have been in England. Similar moves were made in Canada in 1986, France in 1994, and Thailand in 2005. Polanski was also close to being arrested in Israel in July 2007, but a delay over paperwork requested by the Israelis meant he fled before the arrest could be made.

In July, lawyers for the Oscar-winning director claimed that the US authorities had not tried to arrest him for fear of drawing attention to their own misconduct.

Amid a growing diplomatic row over the arrest, prosecutors gave details of the contacts they had with several countries in their attempts to arrest Polanski.

The director pleaded guilty in 1977 to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl while photographing her during a modelling session and was sent to prison for 42 days for evaluation. The judge then tried to renege on the plea bargain struck with Polanski. On the day of sentencing in 1978, aware the judge would send him back to prison, Polanski fled to France.

Chief inspector Thomas Hession of the US Marshals Service, which has an LA-based team that requested the arrest warrant last week, said Polanski had been the subject of an Interpol "red notice" for years. It stated that Polanski was wanted for a specific crime, and that the US was willing to seek his extradition.

Polanski's agent, Jeff Berg, said he was aware of no efforts to arrest the director before Saturday. The timing of the arrest "certainly appears unusual", Berg said, especially since Polanski spent the summer at his house in Switzerland.

Hession said Polanski was arrested because authorities had the advance knowledge and the opportunity. "The idea that we have known where he is and we could have gotten him anytime, that just isn't the case," he said.

France and Poland urged Switzerland to free the 76-year-old director on bail and said they would be lobbying the US government all the way up to the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.

Frédéric Mitterrand, the French culture minister, said the arrest was proof of the "frightening" side of America.

Polanski, the director of Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby, had travelled to Switzerland to accept an award at the Zurich film festival. The event's organisers expressed "great consternation and shock" at his detention.

Not exactly a good likeness though, is it? It looks more Karl Malden than Roman Polanski to me...

The Associated Press is a US news agency employing over 4,000 people

The Associated Press (AP) news agency has accidently published internal notes about the arrest of film director Roman Polanski instead of a story.

The document details an exchange of messages between reporters about Mr Polanski, who was held in Switzerland and faces extradition to the US.

In the note, one reporter asks if his colleague can "do some more probing" and speculates that Switzerland was under pressure from the US.

AP swiftly filed a replacement article.

The mistake came to light on 27 September, with the headline "Swiss arrest Polanski on US request in sex case".

But rather than a conventional news story, the post contained basic information as to when the press conference would start, and then continued, saying the reporter would "push out another writethru [sic] with some more background details before press conference", while a colleague wondered if the Swiss were under "intense pressure" and whether they wanted "to throw the US a bone".

Sent in error, the copy was picked up by the Google News service, as well as being automatically posted to a number of websites, including Forbes.

The Associated Press subsequently sent out the proper news copy, saying that "Director Roman Polanski was arrested by Swiss police for possible extradition to the United States for having sex in 1977 with a 13-year-old girl".

Exile

Mr Polanski has lived in France since fleeing the US in 1978 to avoid facing a prison sentence after pleading guilty to having sex with a minor.

Since then, Mr Polanski has been unable to return to the US for fear of arrest, and has even avoided making films in the UK because of the danger of extradition.

However, the film maker was detained in Zurich on Saturday as he travelled from France to collect a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival.

He is being held under a 2005 international alert issued by the US.

Roman Polanski at Marrakech film festival last year. He was arrested as he arrived in Switzerland to attend an awards ceremony. Photograph: Abdelhak Senna/AFP/Getty Images

For 31 years he lived as the world's most celebrated fugitive, feted by his peers in the film industry while on the run from American police after admitting having sex with a child.

But, it was revealed today, the past has finally caught up with Roman Polanski. The film director was arrested in Switzerland on Saturday on a decades-old warrant relating to the rape of a 13-year-old girl in 1977.

The director had travelled to Switzerland to accept a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich film festival, the organisers of which expressed "great consternation and shock" at his detention.

The 76-year-old director of Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown pleaded guilty to the assault at the time but jumped bail and fled the US the following year to avoid a lengthy jail sentence. For more than three decades he has lived in exile in Paris, refusing to return to the US even when he won an Oscar in 2002 for The Pianist.

Zurich police said he was detained at immigration in Zurich on Saturday night at the request of the US justice department and was in custody awaiting extradition.

"I confirm that Mr Polanski has been arrested. The American authorities issued an international search request in 2005 in relation to a 1978 warrant," said Guido Balmer of the Swiss justice ministry. "There was a valid arrest request and we knew when he was coming. That's why he was taken into custody." The US will now need to make a formal extradition request, however, and Polanski is likely to challenge his detention in the Swiss courts.

Polanski was born in Paris to Polish parents and has French citizenship; France's culture minister Frédéric Mitterand said he was "dumbfounded" at the arrest, adding that he "strongly regrets that a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already experienced so many of them". The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, "is following the case with great attention and shares the minister's hope that the situation can be quickly resolved", the minister said.

Polanski has a house in Switzerland and spent much of the summer there, according to British writer Robert Harris, who in recent months has been working closely with the director on a film adaptation of his novel The Ghost. Harris told the Guardian he thought there was "something very odd, very suspicious" about the timing of the arrest. "To my knowledge, Roman in recent years has travelled to Germany, Spain, Italy, Egypt, Greece, Russia, China. So why now, all of a sudden, is an elderly man grabbed off a plane on a Saturday night and stuffed into jail?"

The director was permitted one call to his wife, French actor Emmanuelle Seigner, who left their two young children to travel to Switzerland, Harris said. "This is a high-profile action designed to send out some sort of message to someone somewhere. No one condones what happened in the 70s, but I think this is pretty appalling."

A statement from the Swiss Association of Directors called it a "grotesque judicial farce and a monstrous cultural scandal", while the country's Association of Film Directors and Script Writers called the move "a slap in the face for the entire cultural community in Switzerland".

Polanski was 44 and already a twice-Oscar-nominated director in March 1977 when he had sex with Samantha Gailey, a 13-year-old model he had hired for a photoshoot, at Jack Nicholson's house in Los Angeles. He has argued that the sex was consensual, saying the girl was "not unresponsive", though Gailey said he drugged her with painkillers and champagne before carrying out a "very scary" assault.

The director pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse in a deal with prosecutors that saw them drop charges of rape, drugging and sodomy, which could have carried a life sentence, but fled the country in February 1978 when it became apparent that he was likely to serve time in prison.

Polanski's arrest is the latest twist in an extraordinary life that has been marked by violence, tragedy and controversy. His family returned to Poland shortly before the outbreak of the second world war and were forced into the Krakow ghetto with thousands of other Jewish families. The young Polanski escaped from the ghetto in 1943, but his parents were shipped to concentration camps, and his mother was murdered in Auschwitz.

Polanski married American actor Sharon Tate in 1968, but the following year, when eight months pregnant with his baby, she and four other people were brutally murdered by members of Charles Manson's "family".

In recent months, lawyers for Polanski have been seeking through the US courts to have the rape charges against him dropped, after new evidence emerged in a documentary that, they argued, showed he was a victim of "judicial misconduct" at his original trial. The film showed a former Los Angeles deputy district attorney admitting discussing the case with the trial judge while it was ongoing.

In February a Los Angeles judge agreed that "substantial … misconduct" had taken place during the original court proceedings, but said he could not drop the charges so long as Polanski remained a fugitive. Polanski has since appealed against the ruling, insisting he would not voluntarily return to the US even to clear his name.

Gailey, now called Samantha Geimer and a 44-year-old mother of three, has also spoken in support of his attempt to dismiss the charges, accusing the district attorney's office of resurrecting "lurid details" of her assault to distract attention from its own wrongdoing. "True as they may be, the continued publication of those details causes harm to me."

She added: "I have survived, indeed prevailed against, whatever harm Mr Polanski may have caused me as a child."