A California prosecutor is slamming director Roman Polanski’s latest court filing in the long-running dispute over his nearly 40-year-old rape conviction.
“The defendant has become the criminal version of a vexatious litigant,” L.A. County deputy district attorney Michele Hanisee said in a court document opposing the convicted sex offender’s latest legal motion, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
“The People further request the Court to deny any future request to relitigate those issues absent a showing of new facts or a change in circumstance,” she added, THR reported. “Defendant’s repetitive and duplicative filings, his admitted attempts to manipulate the People, and his apparent attempts to manipulate this Court with thinly veiled threats, constitute an abuse of the judicial process.”
Already an established and acclaimed Hollywood movie director Polanski fled the United States in 1978 after he learned a judge planned on rescinding a previously agreed-upon deal that would have punished him with a short stint in jail for a statutory rape conviction stemming from a sexual encounter with a 13-year-old girl a year earlier. Facing years in prison instead, Polanski fled to and took up residence in France.
Various attempts in subsequent decades to force Polanski’s extradition have met with failure, and Polanski himself is hoping to return stateside at long last, but only if he’s first assured about how his sentencing in the rape case will be handled before arriving on U.S. soil.
For her part, Polanski’s victim, Samantha Geimer, has said she’s forgiven him and suggested his brief time in jail in the 1970s suffices as punishment.
“He’s apologized, I forgive him. I know that he’s sorry and he didn’t mean to hurt me. He’s admitted what he did. He went to jail,” Ms. Geimer said in a TMZ interview, according to Business Insider.
• Ken Shepherd can be reached at kshepherd@washingtontimes.com.
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