FACTBOX: Key facts on director Roman Polanski | Entertainment | Reuters(Reuters) - Roman Polanski, Oscar-winning director of the "Pianist," was arrested at the request of U.S. officials when trying to enter Switzerland to receive a prize from the Zurich Film Festival.
Polanski's arrest Saturday night was on a 1978 warrant issued by Los Angeles for unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl. That girl is now a grown woman, Samantha Geimer, who lives in Hawaii. She has said Polanski should not serve any more time in prison.
Here are some key facts about Polanski and the case:
* Born Raymond Polanski to Polish-Jewish parents on August 18, 1933, he spent the first three years of his life in Paris before the family returned to Poland.
* In World War Two when the Germans sealed off the Jewish ghetto in Krakow in 1940, his father shouted to Roman to run and he escaped. His mother later died in an Auschwitz gas chamber.
* His first full-length feature film after graduation, "Knife in the Water," won a number of awards and, most important for Polanski, was his ticket to Hollywood movies.
* In August 1969, Polanski's wife, actress Sharon Tate, and six others, were hacked to death by followers of cult leader Charles Manson at his Hollywood home in a random attack.
* Polanski is wanted in the United States because in 1977 he pleaded guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl at a party that took place in the home of actor Jack Nicholson. Under his plea agreement, Polanski would have been sentenced to the 42 days he had already served in jail under psychiatric evaluation.
* But Polanski believed the judge, who has since died, might alter the plea agreement and require Polanski to spend years in jail, so he skipped bail in 1978 and fled to France before sentence was pronounced.
* A 2008 documentary film, "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" looked at the case in detail. It included interviews with Geimer and lawyers involved in the case. Also in 2008, Polanski's lawyers sought to have the case dismissed based on an idea advanced in the film that there had been prosecutorial and judicial misconduct 30 years earlier.
* In an interview to promote the film, Geimer told Reuters, "I don't think he's a danger to society" and "I don't think he needs to be locked up forever, and no one has ever come out, ever, besides me and accused him of anything."
* Earlier this year, Polanski's attorneys lost their bid for a dismissal when Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza ruled their legal motion "discloses no legal grounds for disqualification" of the original case.
* Polanski won a best director Oscar for his 2002 film "The Pianist," as well as the Cannes film festival's Palme d'Or (Golden Palm). He has also directed such film classics as "Chinatown," "Repulsion" and "Rosemary's Baby."
(Additional reporting by Bob Tourtellotte in Los Angeles; Editing by Doina Chiacu)
September 27, 2009
FACTBOX: Key facts on director Roman Polanski | Entertainment | Reuters
Director Roman Polanski Arrested By Swiss : NPR -SERIOUSLY, THIS IS FUCKING RETARDED
September 27, 2009Director Roman Polanski Arrested By Swiss : NPRThe Swiss Justice Ministry says director Roman Polanski is being held by Swiss authorities ahead of his possible extradition to the United States for having sex in 1977 with a 13-year-old girl.
The ministry says in a statement that Polanski was arrested Saturday upon arriving in Zurich. It says U.S. authorities have sought Polanski's arrest around the world since 2005.
The 76-year-old was flying in to receive an award at the Zurich Film Festival.
Polanski fled the U.S. in 1978, a year after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with the girl.
The statement Sunday said Polanski will not be sent to the U.S. until extradition proceedings are completed. Polanski can contest his detention and any extradition decision in the Swiss courts.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
ZURICH (AP) — Director Roman Polanski was taken into custody, Swiss police confirmed Sunday, on a 1978 U.S. arrest warrant for having sex with a 13-year-old girl.
Polanski was flying in to receive an honorary award at the Zurich Film Festival when he was detained late Saturday at the airport, festival organizers said in a statement.
Zurich police spokesman Stefan Oberlin confirmed Polanski's arrest, but refused to provide more details because he said it was a matter for the Swiss Justice Ministry.
Ministry spokesman Guido Balmer declined to comment. Rudolf Wyss, the Justice Ministry deputy director, also declined to comment on the case. But he told The Associated Press that Switzerland and the United States have an extradition treaty dating back to the 1950s that is still in force.
Polanski fled the U.S. in 1978, a year after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl.
The 76-year-old director of such classic films as "Chinatown" and "Rosemary's Baby" has asked a U.S. appeals court in California to overturn a judges' refusal to throw out his case. He claims misconduct by the now-deceased judge who had arranged a plea bargain and then reneged on it.
Polanski has lived for the past three decades in France, where his career has continued to flourish. He received a directing Oscar in absentia for the 2002 movie "The Pianist."
Festival organizers said Polanski's detention had caused "shock and dismay," but that they would go ahead with Sunday's planned retrospective of the director's work.
The Swiss Directors Association sharply criticized authorities for what it deemed "not only a grotesque farce of justice, but also an immense cultural scandal."
A native of France who was taken to Poland by his parents, Polanski escaped Krakow's Jewish ghetto as a child and lived off the charity of strangers. His mother died at the Auschwitz Nazi death camp.
He worked his way into filmmaking in Poland, gaining an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film in 1964 for his "Knife in the Water." Offered entry to Hollywood, he directed the classic "Rosemary's Baby" in 1968.
But his life was shattered again in 1969 when his wife, actress Sharon Tate, and four other people were gruesomely murdered by followers of Charles Manson. She was eight months pregnant.
He went on to make another American classic, "Chinatown," released in 1974.
In 1977, he was accused of raping a teenager while photographing her during a modeling session. The girl said Polanski plied her with champagne and part of a Quaalude pill at Jack Nicholson's house while the actor was away. She said that, despite her protests, he performed oral sex, intercourse and sodomy on her.
Polanski was allowed to plead guilty to one of six charges, unlawful sexual intercourse, and was sent to prison for 42 days of evaluation.
Lawyers agreed that would be his full sentence, but the judge tried to renege on the plea bargain. Aware the judge would sentence him to more prison time and require his voluntary deportation, Polanski fled to France.
The victim, Samantha Geimer, who long ago identified herself publicly, has joined in Polanski's bid for dismissal, saying she wants the case to be over. She sued Polanski and reached an undisclosed settlement.
William, Safire, Nixon'S Speech-writer, DieD @ SEVENTYNINE "N'OOO--OOOO-OOOOOO!'" FREE PUNCTUATION DAY
William Safire, Nixon Speechwriter, Dies At 79 : NPRAlex Wong/Getty ImagesWilliam Safire on Meet The Press in 2007.
William Safire, the conservative columnist and word warrior who eagerly took on political figures and the English language, died Sunday at age 79.
The Pulitzer Prize winner died in Maryland, assistant Rosemary Shields said. He had been diagnosed with cancer, but she declined to say when that had happened or what type of cancer he had.
Safire spent more than 30 years writing on the op-ed page of The New York Times. In his "On Language" column in The New York Times Magazine and more than a dozen books, Safire traced the origins of words and everyday phrases such as "straw-man," "under the bus" and "the proof is in the pudding."
Safire penned more than 3,000 columns, aggressively defending civil liberties and Israel while tangling with political figures. Bill Clinton famously wanted to punch the curmudgeonly columnist in the nose after Safire called his wife, Hillary Clinton, "a congenital liar."
Shields said: "Not only was he brilliant in language and assessing the nuances of politics, he was a kind and funny boss who gave lots of credit to others."
As a speechwriter in the Nixon White House, Safire penned Vice President Spiro Agnew's famous phrase, "nattering nabobs of negativism," a tongue-in-cheek alliteration that Safire claimed was directed not at the press but at Vietnam defeatists.
Safire also wrote several novels and served as chairman of the Dana Foundation, a philanthropy that supports brain science, immunology and arts education.
Along with George Will and William F. Buckley Jr., Safire's smooth prose helped make conservatism respectable in the 1970s, paving the way for the Reagan Revolution.
Safire was a pioneer of opinionated reporting. His columns were often filled with sources from Washington and the Middle East, making them must-reads for Beltway insiders.
Author Eric Alterman, in his 1999 book Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy, called Safire an institution unto himself.
"Few insiders doubt that William Safire is the most influential and respected pundit alive," Alterman wrote.
Safire's scathing columns on Carter White House budget director Bert Lance's financial affairs won him the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1978; in 1995 Safire was named to the Pulitzer board.
Critics said Safire made loose accusations trumpeting various "scandals" by the Clintons that were never borne out by the facts.
"Like a pioneering blogger, Safire years ago started grabbing bits of information and wrapping them in the tightest partisan, what-if spin possible," Eric Boehlert wrote in the Web site Salon in 2004. "When the accusation unraveled, he'd simply ignore the thud of his charges hitting the floor."
From 2001 to 2003, Safire also published several columns pressing the case that Saddam Hussein was linked to the Sept. 11 attacks, calling it an "undisputed fact" that hijacker Mohamed Atta met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Prague in April 2001. The 9/11 commission said that meeting never happened.
Safire's pun-filled "On Language" column exploring the foibles and abuses of the English language was far less controversial, winning him more admirers across the political spectrum.
Safire lived in the Washington suburb of Chevy Chase, Md., with his wife, Helene, a British-born jewelry designer; they had a son and a daughter.
Safire, born Dec. 17, 1929, to a Jewish family in New York City, was the youngest of three boys. He attended Syracuse University but dropped out after two years to work as a legman for a Republican political strategist and publicist Tex McCrary, who had a column in the New York Herald Tribune.
Safire started writing speeches for Nixon in 1965 and followed him to the White House. He left shortly before the Watergate break-in erupted into a full-fledged scandal.
