[Narona]

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...olanski&st=cse

Court Records Show Polanski Agreed to Pay Victim to Settle Civil Suit
By Michael Cieply
The film director Roman Polanski agreed to pay at least $500,000 to Samantha Geimer, the victim in his 1977 child-sex case, under a settlement to a civil suit Ms. Geimer later filed against him, The Los Angeles Times reported Saturday. Mr. Polanski agreed to the settlement in 1993, but as of 1996 still had not made the payment, according to court records that were provided to media outlets in Los Angeles in response to requests for access to the old case. It remained unclear whether the settlement was ever paid, though Ms. Geimer was still trying to collect as of 1996, by which time accrued interest had pushed the amount to over $600,000, according to the court records.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/mo...0polanski.html

France Divided Over Polanski Case

PARIS — After two days of widespread expressions of support for jailed filmmaker Roman Polanski, from European political leaders as well as leading cultural figures there and in the United States, the mood was shifting among French politicians Tuesday about whether the government should have rushed to rally around the Oscar-winning director.

Do successful artists get a pass for their moral failings or crimes?

Post a Comment » Marc Laffineur, the vice-president of the French assembly and a member of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling center-right party, the UMP, took issue with the French culture and foreign minister’s remarks supporting Mr. Polanski, saying “the charge of raping a child 13 years old is not something trivial, whoever the suspect is.”

Within the Green party, Daniel Cohn-Bendit — a French deputy in the European parliament whose popularity is rising — also criticized Sarkozy administration officials for leaping too quickly to Mr. Polanski’s side despite the serious nature of his crime. On the extreme right, the father and daughter politicians Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen also attacked the ministers, saying they were supporting “a criminal pedophile in the name of the rights of the political-artistic class.”

Meanwhile, an international team of lawyers was fighting Tuesday to free Mr. Polanski from a Swiss jail, where he’s being held for possible extradition to the United States. The arrest last weekend of the 76-year-old filmmaker as he arrived at Zurich’s airport to attend a local film festival is quickly exposing deep fault lines between his supporters in the arts, entertainment and politics and his increasingly outspoken critics.

Mr. Polanski a French and Polish citizen,. fled the United States in 1978 just before he was to be sentenced for having sex with a minor — a 13-year-old girl — under a plea agreement in which he avoided other charges including rape and sodomy.

For two days, supporters in the demi-monde of movies and media circulated petitions and took to the airwaves in his defense. Among them was the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy (I didn't wait tody to dislike BHL anyway ), who suggested that perhaps the Swiss had more serious criminal matters to attend to than Mr. Polanski, who, he said, “perhaps had committed a youthful error.”

Marie-Louise Fort, a French lawmaker in the Assembly who has sponsored anti-incest legislation, said in an interview that she was shocked that Mr. Polanski was attracting support from the political and artistic elite. “I don’t believe that public opinion is spontaneously supporting Mr. Polanski at all,” she said. “I believe that there is a distinction between the mediagenic class of artists and ordinary citizens that have a vision that is more simple.”

The mood was even more hostile in blogs and e-mails to newspapers and news magazines. Of the 30,000 participants in an online poll by the French daily Le Figaro, more than 70 percent said Mr. Polanski, 76, should face justice. And in the magazine Le Point, more than 400 letter writers were almost universal in their disdain for Mr. Polanski.

That contempt was not only directed at Mr. Polanski, but at the French class of celebrities — nicknamed Les People — who are part of Mr. Polanski’s rarefied Parisian world. Letter writers to Le Point scorned Les People as the “crypto-intelligentsia of our country” who deliver “eloquent phrases that defy common sense.”

Still, many others continued to rally to the Oscar-winning director’s defense.

Film industry leaders like Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, Martin Scorsese and Costa Gavras signed a petition with about 100 names that expressed “stupefaction” with the arrest of Mr. Polanski at the Zurich airport. But support was not universal; Luc Besson, a prominent French film director and producer, was not on the list, though he describes himself as a Polanski friend.

“This is a man who I love a lot and know a little bit,” Mr. Besson said in a radio interview with RTL Soir. “Our daughters are good friends. But there is one justice, and that should be the same for everyone. I will let justice happen.” He added, , “I don’t have any opinion on this, but I have a daughter, 13 years old. And if she was violated, nothing would be the same, even 30 years later.” Meanwhile, Mr. Polanski remains in custody somewhere in Zurich; officials have not said exactly where. He was, however, visited by French and Polish diplomats, who afterward pronounced that he was being well treated.

And it's continue from what I know and read the last few days. Huge disagreements between the French people, and many artists/politcians/journalists.



And another article but too long to quote: http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.c...olanski&st=cse

The Polanski Uproar

The recent arrest of Roman Polanski, the film director who fled to France from the United States in 1978 on the eve of sentencing for having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl, has caused an international ruckus. The French culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, and the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, both issued statements of support for Mr. Polanski. But many others in France have expressed outrage at that support and said he should face justice for the crime.

While it’s clear that the film industry forgave Mr. Polanski long ago, should society separate the work of artists from the artists themselves, despite evidence of reprehensible or even criminal behavior?


Jay Parini, writer
Mark Anthony Neal, professor, African American studies
Geraldine A. Ferraro lawyer
Damon Lindelof, TV executive producer
Mark Bauerlein, professor of English
Charlie Finch, art critic
Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic
Judith Surkis, professor of history and literature
Jonathan Gilmore, philosophy professor

Click here to read the opinions of each of those people.

This one is very interesting though