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Friday, July 22, 2005

He didn’t say it on his way to the funeral.
We’re not calling the woman in to give evidence.
It’s substantially true.
His reputation was already ruined.
How can a guy who lives in France sue an American magazine anyway?
British courts are sure fun to watch.



From the Times online:



Roman Polanski, the film director, was today awarded £50,000 libel damages over a Vanity Fair article which stated that he made sexual advances to a Scandinavian woman soon after his wife’s brutal murder in 1969.

The jury of nine men and three women took four-and-a-half hours to reach their unanimous verdict at London’s High Court. Publisher Conde Naste also faces a legal bill estimated at £1.5 million.

His lawyer, John Kelsey-Fry, argued that Mr Polanski had been "monstrously libelled for the sake of a lurid anecdote" in the 2002 article which accused him of propositioning the woman in a New York restaurant while on the way to Sharon Tate's funeral.

It alleged that Polanski, director of Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist, put his hand on the woman’s thigh and promised her: "I will make another Sharon Tate out of you."

During the high profile trial, Conde Nast accepted that the incident did not happen before Miss Tate’s funeral, but about two weeks later. It maintained the article was substantially true and argued that Mr Polanski's reputation had already been ruined by his 1978 conviction and promiscuous past.

The publisher's case was dealt a devastating blow when it emerged that Beatte Telle, the Norwegian woman allegedly at the receiving end of his unwanted attentions, had not been called to give evidence.

In a statement, Mr Polanski said: "It goes without saying that, whilst the whole episode is a sad one, I am obviously pleased with the jury’s verdict today. …Three years of my life have been interrupted. Three years within which I have had no choice but to relive the horrible events of August 1969, the murders of my wife, my unborn child and my friends… Many untruths have been published about me, most of which I have ignored, but the allegations printed in the July 2002 edition of Vanity Fair could not go unchallenged."

Outside court, Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, said: “I find it amazing that a man who lives in France can sue a magazine that is published in America in a British courtroom. Nevertheless it was interesting to see the wheels of British justice move, and I wish Mr Polanski well. We have a magazine to put out..."


*****************************************
UPDATE:
Telle, the Truth



Polanski Account Affirmed

Beatte Telle, the Norwegian model who didn't testify at the filmmaker Roman Polanski's libel suit against Vanity Fair, has come to his defense in an interview with The Mail of London from her home in a suburb of Oslo, The Associated Press reported. A 2002 article in Vanity Fair said that in an encounter in Elaine's restaurant in Manhattan in August 1969, he had put his hand on her thigh and promised to "to make another Sharon Tate out of you" while en route to the funeral of Tate, his wife, after her murder in California. Ms. Telle told The Mail: "He never said that he would 'make me another Sharon Tate' or that he would make me a star. He never spoke to me at all." She said: "Polanski just stood there. He just stared at me for ages. Perhaps I reminded him of Sharon Tate."