The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (16 page)

“The judge,” Polanski said.

“Who do you think will decide whether or not you will get probation?”

“The judge.”

Silver read his letter in open court. Midway through, Rittenband interrupted him. “I think some of the reporters are taking notes,” he said. “You might read a little slower, so that they will be able to get this.”

T
HE PLEA BARGAIN IS THE MOMENT
when the case pivoted from the story of what Polanski did to Samantha Gailey to the story of what the system did to him. Polanski’s detractors focus on the first, his supporters on the second, but the two are intertwined, and both were shaped by the influence of Polanski’s celebrity.

Polanski’s fate was now in the hands of Judge Rittenband, who had, by 1977, established himself as an eccentric figure on the Los Angeles legal scene. A New York–born prodigy, Rittenband went straight from high school to New York University Law School; too young to take the bar exam after earning his law degree, Rittenband filled the time by acquiring an undergraduate education at Harvard. Wounded in the Second World War, he moved to California, started practicing law, and won appointment as a judge in 1961. Rittenband presided in the Santa Monica courthouse and could be a querulous, domineering presence on the bench. He snared many of the high-profile cases that tend to occur in that tony region of Los Angeles County—Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s divorce, a child-custody case involving Marlon Brando, a paternity suit against Cary Grant.

Rittenband was a peripheral Hollywood player—a lifelong bachelor who juggled several girlfriends and enjoyed the friendship of movie stars at the Hillcrest Country Club. He also seems to have sought out the news media more than other judges. As Rittenband assumed control of the case, Polanski’s celebrity, heretofore an important advantage for him, became more of a mixed blessing.

Since the nineteen-seventies, in California and elsewhere, criminal sentencing has changed dramatically, particularly with regard to the role of the judge. “California used to have a wide-open system, where the law gave the judge a lot of discretion about how long to sentence someone,” Robert Weisberg, a professor at Stanford Law School, said. That system, which was known as “indeterminate sentencing,” evolved into the current, very different regime, which is known as “determinate sentencing.” Judges now have far less latitude, and discretionary parole has been abolished for most crimes in California. Sentences are more severe. Today, an adult defendant who pleaded guilty to statutory rape in California would likely receive about three years in state prison.

In addition, the sentencing process has become more formalized, with the judges being required to present explicit findings concerning how they reached decisions. Three decades ago, especially in Rittenband’s courtroom, a case would often be resolved with an off-the-record understanding among the lawyers and the judge. Dalton was hoping for a deal that would lead to probation.

After Polanski’s guilty plea, his chances for a light sentence at first seemed good. In the previous year, according to Polanski’s defense team, none of the convictions for statutory rape in Los Angeles County resulted in a sentence to state prison, although many defendants spent time in county jails or lockups. (How many defendants had been allowed to plea down from charges as serious as those against Polanski is another question.) The report in the case by the probation officer, Irwin Gold, read more like the words of a starstruck fan than like those of a law-enforcement officer. After a lengthy summary of Polanski’s tragic past, Gold wrote, “Possibly not since Renaissance Italy has there been such a gathering of creative minds in one locale as there has been in Los Angeles County during the past half-century. The motion-picture industry has proved [a] magnet to many of them.” As for Polanski’s crime, Gold wrote:

Alvin E. Davis, the psychiatrist Gold cited, seemed equally smitten, writing that incarceration “would impose an unusual degree of stress and hardship because of [Polanski’s] highly sensitive personality and devotion to his work.” Davis saw the rape as the result of the “loss of normal inhibitions in circumstances of intimacy and collaboration in creative work, and with some coincidental alcohol and drug intoxication.” In the report’s twisted recitation, Polanski’s proffer of alcohol and drugs to a child becomes exculpatory; his claim of a “lack of coercion” is accepted as fact.

But on September 16, 1977, three days before Polanski was to be sentenced, Rittenband called the lawyers in the case to an off-the-record private meeting in his chambers—a meeting that remains a crucial point of controversy in the case. According to Dalton, Rittenband said that he had decided to order Polanski to go to the state prison at Chino for a “diagnostic study” of his mental state, which might take as long as ninety days, under a California law that allowed for evaluation of prisoners before sentencing. Assuming that the report from the psychiatrists at Chino would be favorable, Dalton later wrote in a court filing, the judge told the lawyers that “the diagnostic study at Chino would constitute defendant Polanski’s punishment and that there would be no further incarceration.” At the meeting, the prosecutor and the probation officer told Judge Rittenband that it was inappropriate to use a diagnostic study as a punishment, but the judge ignored them, and an improvisational sentence was not, in fact, unusual for its time.

Rittenband made another request: he asked for what Dalton, in a 2008 affidavit, called a “charade of arguing our respective positions at the Probation and Sentencing Hearing on September 19.” Dalton told me, “Rittenband said, ‘You both argue. You argue for a prison sentence, and you argue for probation.’ But it was all for show”—he had already made up his mind. (Gunson, the prosecutor, agrees with this version of events.) Three days later, at the public hearing, Gunson and Dalton did as Rittenband instructed. Rittenband also kept to his script and ordered the mental evaluation at Chino.

Dalton expressed no real objection to the diagnostic sentence, because his client appeared to be on a glide path to avoiding real prison time. “All we needed was a good psychiatric report, and Roman would have been free,” Dalton said. But the defense lawyer made what turned out to be a miscalculation. At the September 16th meeting in Rittenband’s chambers, Dalton asked the judge to stay the order of incarceration until Polanski could complete work on a new directing project. In another example of Polanski’s privileged status, Rittenband said that he would publicly authorize a reprieve of only ninety days, but he told Dalton, off the record, that he would have the option of asking for further stays, until the film was finished.

P
OLANSKI’S PLAN TO DIRECT
“The First Deadly Sin” had fallen through after his arrest, but he was quickly hired to direct a remake of the 1937 film “The Hurricane,” which was to be produced by Dino de Laurentiis, a major figure in middlebrow seventies cinema. Polanski was happy to get the work, even if it appeared likely to fall below his usual aesthetic standards. (The plot was to include pearl divers getting caught in a giant clam.) “Dino’s faith in me showed I had ceased to be a complete Hollywood outcast,” Polanski wrote. He wanted Kinski to play the female lead. “Although Dino was bowled over by her looks, he doubted if she could acquire a sufficient command of English before shooting began.”

De Laurentiis asked Polanski to go to Europe, to set up a West German distribution deal. While there, Polanski was photographed at an Oktoberfest celebration in Munich, sitting amid a group of attractive young women, and smoking a cigar. The picture went out on the U.P.I. wire, and was printed in the September 29, 1977, edition of the Santa Monica
Evening Outlook
, with a caption stating that Polanski “enjoys the companionship of some young ladies at the Munich, Germany, Oktoberfest.” The photograph infuriated Rittenband, who believed that Polanski was abusing the privilege of the stay of his sentence. Rittenband gave an interview to a gossip columnist (even then an unusual thing for a judge to do in a pending case), Marylin Beck, who reported that “Roman Polanski could be on his way to prison this weekend.” Polanski’s celebrity was turning against him.

Rittenband ordered Dalton to bring Polanski back to Santa Monica for a hearing about why the stay should not be revoked. At the hearing, on October 24th, Dalton called witnesses, including de Laurentiis, who established that Polanski had a legitimate business reason for being in Germany. Rittenband was persuaded to leave the stay in effect, but he declined to extend the ninety-day limit. Given the uncertainty of Polanski’s situation, de Laurentiis fired him. (The film, directed by Jan Troell and starring Mia Farrow, was released in 1979, to dismal public response.) Polanski entered the Chino prison shortly before Christmas and was released, when his evaluation was complete, forty-two days later, on January 29, 1978. According to a letter to Rittenband from Chino’s associate superintendent, “Staff are in agreement the granting of probation in this case would be in the best interest of all concerned.”

On January 30th, the day after Polanski was released—and two days before he was to be officially sentenced—Rittenband summoned the lawyers for another private meeting. Rittenband said that he was unhappy with the diagnostic report, which he called a “whitewash.” This was, to be sure, an understandable reaction, given that the Chino report, like the earlier probation report, was extremely deferential toward Polanski. But Rittenband also expressed discomfort with the way his rulings had been received by the public. He had changed his mind again, saying that he had decided to impose an additional prison sentence. The Judge said he was considering limiting the further punishment to forty-eight days—to complete the original ninety days—but only if Polanski then agreed to leave the United States for good. (Polanski did not have a green card; he is a French and Polish citizen.) At a meeting the next day, with Lawrence Silver, Gailey’s lawyer, also present, Rittenband said, according to Dalton, that “there was nothing which could be produced by the defense that would influence him regarding his intended sentence.”

Dalton informed Polanski of the latest dispiriting turn of events. It wasn’t clear what Rittenband was going to do, although it did seem that there would be more prison time in Polanski’s future—perhaps just forty-eight days, or perhaps more. (It was also not clear how Rittenband planned to enforce his deportation plan. State judges have no authority over immigration matters.) Polanski wrote in his autobiography, “Since it was clear that I had served my forty-two days in Chino for nothing, an obvious question arose: what had I to gain by staying? The answer appeared to be: nothing.” In fact, Polanski had the right to appeal any sentence that Rittenband might impose, although prevailing would be a long shot. But Polanski decided that he had trusted the American legal system long enough. That evening, without telling Dalton, he took a British Airways flight to London. By the following morning, when Dalton appeared in front of Rittenband to announce that Polanski had fled, the director had flown on to Paris. At what would have been the sentencing hearing, on February 1st, Rittenband issued a bench warrant for the arrest of Polanski, who was now a fugitive.

F
IVE DAYS LATER
, on February 6th, Rittenband held a press conference in his chambers to denounce Polanski for fleeing and to reveal that he planned to sentence him in absentia. He confirmed that he had wanted Polanski to leave the country after his release. Dalton responded by filing a motion to have Rittenband recused from the case for bias. (Holding a press conference about a pending case was one of the grounds.) Rittenband agreed to be replaced, though he refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing; if Polanski had returned, his case would have been heard by a different judge. In subsequent years, Rittenband nevertheless vowed to sit on the bench until Polanski came back, but he retired in 1989, and died in 1993, at the age of eighty-eight.

Polanski settled into a spacious apartment on the Avenue Montaigne. By August, 1978, seven months after fleeing the States, he was shooting his next film, “Tess,” a movie version of Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” starring Nastassja Kinski, who was still in her teens. (The story features an older man who either seduces or rapes the young Tess.) The film won Polanski his third Academy Award nomination. (He lost to Robert Red-ford, for “Ordinary People.”)

Thus began Polanski’s fruitful, if somewhat circumscribed, years of exile. “Roman is a superstar in the streets of Paris,” his friend Thom Mount, who produced three of Polanski’s movies, said. “He walks into a restaurant, and the headwaiter faints.” Polanski’s status as a fugitive from American justice has made it difficult, but not impossible, for him to continue to direct major films. “The case was more than just background noise,” Jeff Berg, his agent, said. “It determined what he could do and where he could do it and with whom he could work.” (Berg is the chief executive of International Creative Management, where I am also a client.) The terms of the Franco-American extradition treaty do not compel either country to extradite its own citizens, but Polanski has had to be careful in his travels; the United Kingdom, for example, has been off-limits. It was seven years between “Tess” and “Pirates,” a misbegotten seafaring adventure starring, of all people, Walter Matthau. Two years later, in 1988, Polanski released “Frantic,” a thriller set in Paris, with Harrison Ford and Emmanuelle Seigner, who was then his girlfriend. It turned out to be his last production with a major American studio. In 1989, he married Seigner, and over the following decade they had two children.