Years after his signature for Polański, David Lynch’s daughter explains why he acted like this and how he regretted the step later.
It has been almost 20 years ago that a whole series of renowned Hollywood greats publicly stood behind the Polish-French film director Roman Polański with a simple signature. In 1973 he stood up and raped the then 13-year-old Samantha Gailey with pretended a photo shoot in the house of the “Shining” star Jack Nicholson.
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Roman Polanski fled from the United States in 1978 after he was guilty of sexual acts in the process. Since then, he has not entered the US soil because he fears that he would have to compete with a prison-shortly after an indictment, he was released against the deposit.
The process is almost a blurry memory in public memory-and the court trial around the 90-year-old filmmaker is unofficially put on hold. Now a Tikok user has dug up the topic and searched the list of Hollywood greats who signed the petition at the time to protect the convict from delivery and consequently prison sentence in the USA.
The director, producer and screenwriter David Lynch, who died in January, was one of them. While he never publicly commented on his signing, his daughter Jennifer now does it for him.
What happened so far
In 1972 Roman Polański committed his deed and was initially detained. Due to the age of the victim, a court psychiatric assessment of Polański was legally prescribed, for which he was instructed to the state prison for 90 days. After 42 days, early dismissal was carried out with the judicial recommendation to impose a suspended sentence. However, when it became apparent that the judge responsible would give the director a harder sentence than discussed before, Polański fled to London and then lived in France, Switzerland and Poland. Since then he has avoided travel to the USA and other countries in which delivery can be expected.
The case was discussed again in September 2009. Roman Polański was arrested due to an international arrest warrant from 2005 at the instigation of the US law enforcement authorities when entering Switzerland at the airport in Zurich. He was on the way to accepting a prize for his life’s work at the Zurich Film Festival. In the course of this there was a petition that should enable a return of Polański. In 2010, the Swiss judicial authorities showed the delivery application and raised Polański’s house arrest – however, his arrest warrant in the USA still applies today.
Jennifer Lynch: “There is no justification, but there is an explanation”
At that time, many of the signing, such as Emma Thompson or Natalie Portman, could be removed from the list again, when the famous filmmaker avoided Us-American soil. David Lynch was none of them, but his daughter Jennifer saw himself after the user was published by the Tikoks @Grd4na Forced to publish a statement on behalf of her late father.
In the event of an almost heart -warming exchange in the comment column under the video, Jennifer Lynch explained that she herself had difficulty processing her father’s signature. Lynch reports on a “stressful conversation” that she left behind with an angry and “broken heart”. However, she was also quite sure: after the discussion, her father was different. In view of the ambiguity about what Roman Polański had committed and in particular after the victim’s request in 2010, the lawsuit falls after the event was made too large in the media, the universal artist Lynch did not consider it necessary to comment in detail.
“For some reason, when he signed with others, he thought not to the child, but of an artist who wanted to go back to the States and back to the story. The daughter of the estimated film director also reports in a comment that the assumption that Polański was the victim worthy of protection afterwards. In conclusion, she writes: “Yes, he signed. That was wrong. When our conversation came to an end, Dad recognized that. If you asked him today, he would not sign”.
Discussions of this kind tend to degenerate due to its polarization power, especially on social media. But not in this case: Jennifer Lynch’s honest words seem to be a lot of comfort to some fans who were shocked and disappointed by David Lynch’s surrounded signing. In this way, Lynch’s daughter did what her father could not do during his lifetime: clarity and understanding in the Polański case.