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Did he do it? Only Roman knows for sure

By ROBERT FRIEDMAN
Published July 31, 2005

Thanks to the British courts, Roman Polanski has gotten back his good name.

Earlier this month, the Polish director, convicted child molester and fugitive from justice won his libel suit against Vanity Fair. The magazine published an article in 2002 claiming Polanski had clumsily propositioned a young Scandanavian model just before traveling to the funeral of his wife, the actress Sharon Tate, who was murdered in 1969 by members of Charles Manson's cult.

Vanity Fair later admitted that the story's chronology was wrong: It said the incident happened a couple of weeks after Tate's funeral. Otherwise, though, the magazine produced credible witnesses to confirm the story's accuracy. And besides, Vanity Fair's lawyers argued, Polanski already had such egregious sexual sins on his rap sheet that he couldn't possibly be libeled.

None of that swayed the British jury, which awarded Polanski about $87,700 in damages and ordered Vanity Fair to pay a portion of his legal bills.

The trial was a complicated affair. Vanity Fair is based in the United States, but Polanski filed suit in Britain, where libel laws are more favorable to plaintiffs. And Polanski arranged to remain at his Paris home throughout the trial, because he feared that traveling to Britain would leave him vulnerable to extradition to the United States, where he pleaded guilty in 1977 to having sex with a 13-year-old girl.

In the Vanity Fair article, Lewis Lapham, the erudite editor of Harper's magazine, recounted how Polanski groped and propositioned Norwegian model Beatte Telle at Elaine's restaurant in Manhattan just before leaving for California to attend Tate's funeral.

"I watched as he slid his hand inside (Telle's) thigh and began a long, honeyed spiel which ended with the promise, "And I will make another Sharon Tate out of you,' " the article quoted Lapham as saying.

"I was impressed by the remark," Lapham told the British court, "not only because it was tasteless and vulgar, but because it was a cliche." Edward Perlberg, Telle's boyfriend at the time, testified that the incident happened much as Lapham recounted it.

But other witnesses questioned the story. Mia Farrow, who starred in Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, told the court she had dinner with Polanski at Elaine's around that time and never saw him attempt to seduce anyone.

When a lawyer reminded Farrow that Polanski had admitted launching into a spree of casual sex within a month of Tate's murder, the former partner of Frank Sinatra and Woody Allen had this to say: "I feel there's a big distinction - for men maybe - between relationships and having sex. I don't see that as disrespect of Sharon. . . . I would swear that on a stack of Bibles."

Telle, the supposed target of Polanski's advances, didn't testify during the trial, but she emerged in Oslo a few days later to defend Polanski. "He never said that he would "make me another Sharon Tate' or that he would make me a star," she told the Mail. "He never spoke to me at all. (He) just stood there. He just stared at me for ages. . . . Perhaps I reminded him of Sharon Tate."

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter issued this statement after the verdict . "I find it astonishing that a man who lives in France can be permitted to sue a magazine published in America in a British courtroom. And that he can do so without ever having to show up in person.

"Furthermore, as a father of four children, one of whom is a 12-year-old daughter, I find it equally outrageous that this story is considered defamatory to a man who can't be here because he slept with a 13-year-old-girl and has been a fugitive from justice for more than a quarter of a century."

The last word on what really happened on that night in 1969 was left to Elaine Kaufman, then and now the proprietor of Elaine's. "It was a very complicated period," she told the New York Times. "Everybody was drinking, everybody was smoking cigarettes, or whatever. I don't know how they could remember anything."

She said she had no particular memory of Beatte Telle among the many women who frequented Elaine's at the time. "They were all Swedish or Norwegian, they were all 8 feet tall and they all belonged to somebody else," she said.

So there you have it. Michael Jackson is a free man - and the media who were part of the circus of his trial are, with some justification, treated as pariahs. Deep Throat's identity is finally revealed - and much of the country, prompted by right-wing revisionists and Nixon apologists, now treats Mark Felt and Woodward and Bernstein as traitors. A New York Times reporter sits in jail because she refused to identify the source of a story she didn't write. And now Roman Polanski has successfully cast himself as a victim of a media smear.

It's official: Journalists now rank somewhere below child molesters in the eyes of the public and the law.

[Last modified July 29, 2005, 18:03:03]