The Swiss may have declared Roman Polanski a free man, but now another woman has accused him of sexually assaulting her.
According to RadarOnline, Edith Michelle Vogelhut has spoken to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office about being handcuffed and repeatedly sodomized by the director in 1974.
The former model, who was 21 at the time, alleges that Polanski, then at the height of his Hollywood fame with “Chinatown,” handcuffed her at a party at Jack Nicholson’s house and sodomized her repeatedly.
The Los Angeles district attorney did not have a statement on the matter. But a person familiar with the Polanski file at the D.A.'s office did confirm to TheWrap that Vogelhut has spoken to investigators there.
Efforts by TheWrap to reach Vogelhut’s lawyer were not immediately successful.
Nicholson’s home in 1974 was the same Hollywood Hills house in which Polanski drugged and raped 13-year-old Samantha Geimer in 1977. It was the charges and possible punishment from that crime that led the director to jump on a flight out of LAX to Europe on Feb. 1, 1978.
Polanski stayed one step ahead of American justice for almost 30 years – winning an Oscar for “The Pianist” in 2002 – before being arrested on request of the U.S. in Zurich in September 2009.
On May 14, British actress Charlotte Lewis, with her lawyer Gloria Allred by her side, gave a press conference in Los Angeles to announce that Polanski assaulted her in his Paris apartment in 1982 when she was 16. Lewis said she had spoken to the D.A.’s office about the incident.
“I hope that one day Mr. Polanski will be extradited for the crime with which he has been charged,” Allred told TheWrap Monday, “and that he will have to stand before the bar of justice and be sentenced for that crime.”
On July 12, the Swiss government refused U.S. efforts to extradite the 76-year old Polanski, who was under house arrest since December 2009, back to California to face justice for the 1977 rape. Closer to home, the embarrassing fallout from that failed extradition has seen confusion in what the Swiss requested of Los Angeles prosecutors and the Department of Justice, and who knew what.
While his movements now are restricted to France, Poland and Switzerland, Polanski has been seen out at music festivals since his release and is expected to start work soon on a new film, following up on the success of this year’s “The Ghost Writer.”
