| LOS ANGELES, March 12, 1977 — Polish film director Roman Polanski, widower of murdered actress Sharon Tate, was free on bond today on charges of luring a 13-year-old girl to the home of Jack Nicholson under the pretext of photographing her, of drugging her; and of oral sex, vaginal intercourse, and forcible anal rape with a minor. |
| Now 45, Samantha Geimer is a mother of three who lives quietly in Hawaii and works as a bookkeeper. In January, Geimer, who publicly forgave Polanski in 1997, filed a formal request that Los Angeles prosecutors drop the charges against him. "I have survived, indeed prevailed, against whatever harm Mr. Polanski may have caused me as a child," she said at the time. "I got over it a long time ago." Geimer said Polanski had paid, and she wanted to move on and stop reliving the details of the assault every time he made headlines. "True as they may be, the continued publication of those details causes harm to me, my beloved husband, my three children and my mother," she said. |
| The Swiss authorities have decided not to extradite film director Roman Polanski to the United States to face prosecution in a 1977 sex case. The 76-year old Oscar-winning director, who was arrested last September in Zurich and had been under house arrest in Switzerland, is a free man, according to Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf. The US has expressed its disappointment over the move. Widmer-Schlumpf said the decision had been taken following Washington’s refusal to give access to confidential documents. “In these circumstances it was not possible to exclude with the necessary certainty that Roman Polanski had already served the sentence to which he was condemned at the time," Widmer-Schlumpf told a news conference in the capital, Bern, on Monday. She added that Switzerland had also decided against extradition because Polanski had been coming to the country in good faith for years. Switzerland had sought access to the records of a hearing by a Los Angeles public prosecutor, Roger Gunson, who was in charge of the case in the 1970s. Polanski, who had pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse at the time, claimed he feared that a judge might put him in jail for 50 years in violation of a plea bargain. |