In Washington: Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama earlier this month Nicolas Sarkozy hand-delivered a personal letter to Barack Obama from fugitive film director Roman Polanski asking to be spared jail.
Polanski is wanted in the U.S. on child sex charges after fleeing the country 32 years ago.
He was arrested in Switzerland last September as he travelled to a film festival and is fighting extradition while under house arrest in his chalet in Gstaad.
The French president’s intervention has been revealed by the French political weekly L’Express.
Sarkozy hands Polanski’s plea for mercy to Obama
‘In an astonishing act of backroom diplomacy, Nicolas Sarkozy hand-delivered a letter from Roman Polanski to Barack Obama last week on the sidelines of the anti-nuclear proliferation summit in Washington,’ it says.
L’Express suggests that Mr Sarkozy simply ‘played the postman for the film-maker’, but his action will outrage those who believe that Mr Polanski should be punished for his crimes.
Although the letter's details were not revealed it is believed Polanski wrote claiming that the two months he recently spent in a Swiss jail was sufficient punishment.
The 76-year-old has admitted plying 13-year-old Samantha Geimer with champagne and a sedative drug before having sex with her at the home of movie star Jack Nicholson in March 1977.
Polanski was indicted on six charges, including rape by use of drugs, child molesting and sodomy, and pleaded guilty to unlawful intercourse with a minor as part of a judicial bargaining process.
But Polanski fled to his native France before he could be sentenced, having already spent 42 days in an American prison.
Polanski, whose main home is in Paris, also spent two months in a Swiss jail after police arrested him when he was on the way to a film festival in Zurich.
The director of hits including Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist, uses the letter to Obama to say he has more than paid for his crimes.
He also says that extradition to the USA would result in him being humiliated at the hands of the U.S. media.
Meanwhile, in Switzerland: Roman Polanski with friends while on house arrestPolankski and his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, are both close to French First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.
All are well known members of Paris’s ‘artistic’ community.
Miss Seigner is, like Miss Bruni-Sarkozy, a pop singer, and they are both aged 42.
Miss Bruni-Sarkozy has frequently lobbied on behalf of Polanski, arguing that he is too much of a cinematic legend to spend any more time in jail.
Ms Geimer was an aspiring child model who went to Nicholson’s house for a photo-shoot with Mr Polanski.
She is now a mother of three children who lives in Hawaii, and publicly forgave the director in 1997.
But prosecutors in Los Angeles have argued that this ‘pardon’ should not be allowed to influence the outcome of a criminal cases.
Lawyers for Polanski refused to discuss the letter to Mr Obama.
An Elysee Palace spokesman also said there would be no comment from Mr Sarkozy.
source: dailymail
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