On February 1, 1978, after a meeting with the lawyer who had been handling his case of sexual abuse, Roman Polanski drove down to the Los Angeles office of producer Dino de Laurentiis, where he received a sealed envelope from a production assistant and took the next flight out of Los Angeles to London. The next day he traveled to Paris and took permanent residence in the city taking advantage of his French nationality. To this day Polanski has an outstanding arrest warrant which renders him a fugitive of United States law. He is restricted to live in countries that do not have an extradition treaty with this country.
Few lives have been as tumultuous and successful as Polanski’s. Born in Paris to a Russian mother and a Polish father, he was taken to Krakow when he was three years old. As a child he saw how most of the city’s jewish population was confined in the Ghetto, after the german bombings he survived by scavenging supplies with his family, and in 1941, with only eight years, was separated from his parents and his half-sister. Her mother was sent to Auschwitz where she was was gassed within days of her arrival; she was four months pregnant. A few months later, his father Ryszard was taken to the Mauthausen-Gusen Concentration Camp Complex. In 1943, nine years old, Polanski managed to escape the ghetto and survived at first with the help of the Wilks, a Catholic family who had previously agreed to take him in. Unfortunately, the Wilks had subcontracted to another peasant Catholic family who refused to take him but who nevertheless kept all his belongings. Abandoned to his fate he survived the following two years by staying with several families in the villages near Krakow. He was reunited with his father after the Red Army expelled the Nazis from Poland and liberated the concentration camps.
His determination and charisma, which were fundamental for his survival during the war, proved valuable traits for his adult life. He entered the National Film School in Lodz where he first took up acting and then switched to the direction program. During the second half of the fifties he directed a dozen shorts and in 1962 he premiered his first feature film titled Knife in the Water which garnered wide critical acclaim and opened the door to direct international films such as Repulsion starring Catherine Deneuve, The Fearless Vampire Killers, where he met his future wife Sharon Tate, and Rosemary’s Baby, based on Ira Levin’s book of the same name, which deals with Rosemary Woodhouse, a middle-class woman who becomes pregnant with the devil’s son.
On the night of August 8, 1969, a man and three women of the so-called Manson Family broke into 10050 Cielo Drive, the Beverly Hills house that Roman Polanski shared with Sharon Tate and murdered the actress along with three friends and two of the caretakers; Tate was eight and a half months pregnant. Polanski was in Europe at the time preparing a film. Once again he lost the most important person in his life and once again she was pregnant. What kind of cosmic joke makes the same person an indirect victim of two of the most infamous terrible places of the 20th century? The murders quickly became a media frenzy and, given the polemical nature of his films, along with the fact that the murderers were not identified until November, the sensationalist press went as far as suggesting that Polanski belonged to a satanic cult and that he had flown from Europe, killed everyone at his house, including his unborn son, and then flown back. Even after the police found out that the crimes had been the work of the Manson Family, there was the rumor that the murderers had wanted to kill the devil’s son incarnate not in Rosemary’s baby but in Polanski’s and Tate’s.
In February 1977, Vogue Hommes magazine commissioned Polanski with a series of pictures of young girls from the US. The previous year Polanski had taken a photoshoot of Nastassja Kinski, the young daughter of Klaus Kinski, for the French edition of Vogue; for many this pictures kick-started the actress’ career. Before long Polanski and Kinski started a romantic relationship; she was fifteen years old, he was forty two. One of the girls selected by Polanski for the Vogue Hommes sessions was thirteen year old Samantha Jane Gailey. Susie Gailey, Samantha’s mother, was an actress and model who knew Polanski through her older daughter’s boyfriend and wanted Samantha, also a aspiring actress and model, to enter show business. They arranged a test photoshoot in which the girl appeared topless and, later on, Polanski asked Susie Gailey permission for a second session with the girl that took place on March 10, 1977 at Jack Nicholson’s home in the Mulholland area of Los Angeles. Nicholson, who had become friends with Polanski after starring in Chinatown, was skiing in Colorado.
Although the versions of Gailey and Polanski on what exactly happened that day differ, they do share some common points. Both agree they took a series of pictures against the living room window and then moved on to the Jacuzzi. The girl said she was thirsty and Polanski went to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of champagne and a quaalude—a sedative and hypnotic drug known for its recreational uses—which he divided in three. He took a couple of topless shots of the girl with the water up to the waist and then they moved to the bedroom. At this point the versions diverge. Polanski assures that the girl was receptive and he felt a clear sexual tension between them, while Gailey assures to have felt dizzy “and, you know, like things were kinda blurry,” which coincides with the effects of methaqualone. Polanski kissed her and proceeded to have oral, vaginal and anal sex with the girl although she says she repeatedly told him to stop. “Thank God I had had sex before because it would probably have been more damaging if I’d been a virgin. I just wanted it all to be over as quickly as possible.” At one point, finding the bedroom door closed, Angelica Huston, Nicholson’s girlfriend at the time, knocked on the door several times while Polanski raped Gailey. He assured her that they would soon finish the photoshoot and that they would leave in a moment. Apparently Huston desisted and left the house. Polanski had made sure to lock his paradeisos.
A number of questions arise at this point: first, why did a reputable magazine such as Vogue allow minors to be photographed in the absence of a production team or the model’s parents or guardians? Second, why did Gailey’s mother agree to Polanski, who by then had acquired quite the reputation as a womanizer, taking nude pictures of her thirteen-year-old daughter without her being present? Third, how was the situation influenced by the fact that Polanski was known to have promoted the career of stars such as Mia Farrow, Sharon Tate and Nastassja Kinski? As with Bertolucci, Polanski was able to convert a site of cultural production into a locus terribilis, on one hand because of the “artistic freedom” that allowed him to exempt himself from ordinary production protocols, and on the other because of his status as one of the most important film directors at the time. The fact remains that he took advantage of his position of power, of his sovereign exception, to have his way with a child.
Establishing the severity of Polanski’s abuse is a matter of common sense: however mature she may seem, a thirteen-year-old girl barely has the judgment to discern the consequences of a situation and, if we bear in mind the implicit promise of fame that came with his photoshoots, it is not difficult to see that she probably felt psychologically forced to comply to the wishes of the director (this is hardcore, there is no way back for you) In this sense Gailey was victim not only of Polanski’s but of a whole system of exception that favored the appearance of this terrible place. Ultimately, a power relationship that is not explicitly inscribed in the norms of a society—that is, that has not been openly enunciated—is the very origin of sovereign exception (0.10).
Being a big name in the film industry, Polanski’s case called a great deal of attention from the media which, as with the Tate murders, quickly turned it into a media phenomenon. Additionally Laurence J. Rittenband, the judge who took up the case, was a high-profile Hollywood judge who was known for having presided over Elvis Presley’s divorce and Marlon Brando’s child custody battle. Unfortunately, his handling of the Polanski case was not neutral at all and resulted in an untenable situation for both the accused and the victim as well as for the prosecutor and the defense, who pointed out the Judge’s mishandling of justice and argued that whatever the sentence it would be illegal.
His Hollywood standing allowed Polanski several privileges during the trial. For instance, he was granted several stays during the process on the pretext of having to work on his newest film; the terms of his bail even allowed him to leave the country. Judge Rittenband was lenient in the beginning because he knew that whatever jail time he sentenced Polanski to, he would likely appeal and successfully take his case to a higher court. This state of things changed after Polanski was photographed at that year's Munich Oktoberfest surrounded by women, holding a cigar and drinking beer. Upon seeing the picture Judge Rittenband felt deliberately mocked by Polanski and decided to impose harsher sanctions so as not to appear indulgent before the press. He was ordered to return to the United States to serve a ninety days sentence in the State Prison at Chino to undergo a psychiatric examination. This is an excessively long time for this type of procedure and he was led to believe that it would be the full extent of his sentence. He was released after forty two days, when the examination had concluded that he was mentally fit and he could not be judged on the grounds of an underlying psychological condition.
From then on, the trial became a theater controlled by Rittenband, which gave explicit orders to the prosecutor and the defense as if he were an orchestra director. Polanski had gone from fulfilling his wishes in a terrible place of his own devising to becoming the victim of a Kafkaesque court designed to fulfill the wishes of a judge besieged by public opinion. Upon the completion of the forty two-day period at Chino the press and many other elements in the legal system suggested that a mere six weeks of time served for sexual abuse of a minor seemed like a joke. By then Rittenband was at the end of his tether and wanted to find a way to conclude the case swiftly and at the same time save face in the press. He came up with the option of having Polanski waive his rights to stay in the United States but as a county judge he had no jurisdiction on immigration issues, having enforced such a sentence would have amounted to illegal conduct.
Annoyed with the situation, the prosecutor and the defense agreed not to continue participating in a trial which increasingly resembled a theatrical farce; both parties agreed to denounce the way in which the process was being handled. Rittenband presented an option to his deportation plan, (which in itself was illegal): serving a sentence in a state prison that could go up to fifty years. Seeing his options reduced before an unreliable and unpredictable judge, Polanski decided to flee the US. His life has remained a legal locus terribilis as he must must be very careful of his movements when leaving France. In 2005 Interpol issued an Red Notice that alerts authorities the world over when someone enters certain jurisdictions and allows for arrest or provisional arrest with intent of deportation. Like Bertolucci, Polanski went from sovereign to a homo sacer of sorts. Rittenband was removed from the case on February 1978 due to a complaint filed by the defense and supported by the prosecutor.
Like Maria Schneider, Samantha Gailey turned to alcohol and drugs to forget what happened. She became pregnant at eighteen and years later, at the end of the eighties, she managed to turn her life around, she got married and moved to Hawaii. She assures that the moment in which Judge Rittenband withdrew his original offer from the table and threatened Polanski with a sentence in state prison “condemned both of them to live out this episode for the rest of their lives.”1 Her terrible place—a juridical theatre that transforms the zoē of its victims into bios, alienating them from their own lives (0.12)—will not disappear until the case is formally closed. She assures that “the justice system’s decades-long pursuit of the director has harmed her more than he ever did.” Since 1995 she has made several calls for the charges against Polanski to be dropped so she can move on with her life.
- Emma Brockes, “Samantha Geimer on Roman Polanski: ‘We email a little bit’,” The Guardian, September 18, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/18/samantha-geimer-roman-polanski-unlawful-sex-email ↩︎
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