(Oct. 2) - When film director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland late last month on decades-old charges of illegal sex with an underage girl, the French and Polish governments, along with much of Europe's cultural elite, quickly leaped to his defense. But a growing public backlash is now forcing politicians to still their once outraged cries for his release.
On Wednesday, French government spokesman Luc Chatel signaled that the country would pull back from any suggestion of direct intervention in the case.
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Roberto Pfeil, AP
Franco-Polish film director Roman Polanski, pictured here in 2008, is in Swiss detention facing a U.S. extradition order linked to his 1978 guilty plea for illegal sex with a minor.
"We have a judicial procedure under way, for a serious affair, the rape of a minor, on which the American and Swiss legal systems are doing their job," said Chatel, adding that the director was "neither above nor below the law."
That message was in sharp contrast to declarations made by French ministers in the immediate aftermath of the arrest of Polanski, 76. Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, who condemned the director's seizure on a U.S. warrant as "a little sinister," announced on Sept. 27 that he and his Polish counterpart had written a joint letter to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton asking that Polanski be set free. French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand said that Polanski had been "thrown to the lions."
Support for Polanski is also slipping in Poland, where he lived during most of his war-ravaged childhood and his early career. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk demanded that his government display "greater restraint" after Culture Minister Bogdan Zdrojewski labeled the filmmaker's arrest a "legalized lynching."
"This is a matter which obviously involves an outstanding Polish director, and did happen many years ago," said Tusk. "But this is a matter which involves rape, having sex with a child, and we cannot mix politics into it."
This harder line has emerged after a series of surveys in Poland and France revealed that most voters thought Polanski — who pleaded guilty in California in 1978 to having sex with a 13-year-old girl, but fled the country before being sentenced — should be treated like an ordinary fugitive. More than 70 percent of the 30,000 participants in an online poll by French newspaper Le Figaro said Polanski should be extradited to face justice.
Meanwhile in Poland, a survey of nearly 14,000 people by news site tvn24.pl revealed that 53 percent of respondents believed the 'Chinatown' director should "answer for his act," while only 2 percent thought the director should be pardoned because of his artistic legacy.
"It's not the government's role to defend someone like this. That's the role of the court," Warsaw resident Darek Watkowski, 38, told the German Press Agency. "What's disturbing is the comments I read trying to scale down the weight of the crime. Because it was a serious thing."
In both countries, the backlash appears to be grounded in part in the public's aversion to figures of the political or cultural elite assuming they can speak for the nation as a whole. Mitterrand stated that he thought "all the French" felt the "same swelling of emotion" as he did over the case. They clearly did not.
Polanski will likely have plenty of time to mull over his public profile. Unless the director is granted bail by the Swiss authorities, he is expected to spend several months in jail as his French lawyers battle his extradition to the U.S.
