Polanski's wife defends him over child sex



PARIS - Filmmaker Roman Polanski's wife defended him in a rare interview published Thursday, saying the 1970s, when he was convicted of having sex with a 13-year-old girl, was a "crazy" age of sexual permissiveness.
Emmanuelle Seigner, the French actress and singer who has been with the French-Polish director for 25 years, spoke out publicly for the first time since his arrest in Switzerland on extradition proceedings in September.



Emmanuelle Seigner
Emmanuelle Seigner
"I am not a super-liberal person who thinks that nothing is that serious," she told the French edition of the women's magazine Elle. "I also think that at the time people didn't live and react in the same way."
"It was a crazy time. The attitude to drugs was not the same, nor was the attitude to sexual liberty and permissiveness," said the 43-year-old Seigner, who was 10 at the time of Polanski's crime.
In the 1977 case in California, Polanski admitted having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl. He was alleged to have given her champagne and drugs before having sex with her despite her protests.
Polanski, 76, is under house arrest in Switzerland, pending demands by US authorities that he be extradited for sentencing. His lawyers have urged a judge to sentence him in absentia at a hearing scheduled for Friday.
"My husband has never considered himself above the law," the 43-year-old Seignier said.
The filmmaker fled the United States on the eve of his sentencing hearing in 1978 for fear that the trial judge planned to go back on a previously agreed plea deal.
"I knew the story, I had accepted it," Seignier said in the interview, when asked her feelings about the case. "It's not as if it happened last week."
She also talked of her new music album, on which she said she sings a duet with Polanski about a girl who wakes up next to a man she doesn't know after a drunken fling.
"I was advised to remove it at the time (of his arrest), but I didn't want to," she told Elle. "I can assure you there is no special message behind it."
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Friday, January 22nd 2010
AFP
           


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