Polanski sues over 'on the pull after murder' claim

Roman Polanski sued for libel today over a claim that he “went on the pull” after his wife’s brutal murder and exploited her name as a “tool of seduction”.

The 71-year-old film director is suing Conde Naste, publishers of Vanity Fair, over a July 2002 article alleging that 35 years ago he made sexual advances to a “Swedish beauty” in Elaine’s restaurant in New York, just after Sharon Tate and their unborn child had been killed by Charles Manson’s “Family”.

Polanski was abroad on August 8, 1969 when the eight-months-pregnant actress, who he married in January 1968, was slaughtered with four friends at the couple’s home in Bel Air, California.

His QC, John Kelsey-Fry, told Mr Justice Eady and a jury at London’s High Court that Polanski went to pieces at the news and flew directly to Los Angeles to arrange her burial on August 13.

The article claimed that on his way to the funeral, he went to Elaine’s and pulled up a a chair next to the girl “inundating her with his Polish charm”.

It went on: “Fascinated by his performance, I watched as he slid his hand inside her thigh and began a long honeyed spiel which ended with the promise ‘And I will make another Sharon Tate out of you’.”

Mr Kelsey-Fry said: “It means that in the immediate aftermath of hearing of the loss of his wife and child in brutal circumstances, he went on the pull and, moreover, exploited his now late wife’s name as a tool of seduction.

“It reveals monstrous conduct by any bereft husband and father-to-be.

“It would demonstrate a callous indifference to what had happened and to his wife’s memory of breathtaking proportions.”

Counsel said that the magazine, which denies libel, now accepted that none of this happened on the way to the funeral.

Its case was that it occurred two weeks or so later, towards the end of August, and that the article was substantially true.

Polanski’s case, which will be supported in court by actress Mia Farrow, was that the incident never happened at all.

The QC told the panel of nine men and three women that they were taking part “in a bit of legal history” as it was the first time that a claimant would be participating in libel proceedings before a jury by videolink from abroad.

He told them that Polanski was in Paris because if he came to the UK he would be at risk of being extradited to the US.

He said that, in 1977 in California, Polanski had pleaded guilty to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl and had left the US before he was sentenced.

He said that it was undoubtedly a “most unsightly blot” on his reputation but it was not what the case was about.

Equally, the action was not about the director’s “somewhat laissez-faire attitude to casual sex” earlier in his life.