“Roman is not defeated by anything,” a friend says. “He is neither in denial nor apologetic about his life.” Illustration by Philip Burke

On the morning of March 11, 1977, Detective Philip Vannatter, of the Los Angeles Police Department, arrived at his desk in the West L.A. division to find a report that had been placed there a few hours earlier. The document recounted how patrol officers had gone to the home of Samantha Gailey, a thirteen-year-old girl who lived in the San Fernando Valley, after her mother called police to say that Samantha had been raped by Roman Polanski, the movie director, who was forty-four at the time.

“In those days, I was too busy raising kids and paying bills to go to many movies,” Vannatter recalled recently. “But of course I knew who Polanski was, because of Sharon Tate.” Seven and a half years earlier, Tate, who was married to Polanski, and four other people were killed at the couple’s home, in Benedict Canyon, by members of Charles Manson’s “family.”

Vannatter read the file and went to interview Gailey and her mother, reported on his findings to prosecutors in the district attorney’s office, and then took the girl and the mother to speak to the lawyers themselves. According to Vannatter, “The prosecutor decided that we should go to the hotel where Polanski was staying and execute a search warrant”—to find, among other things, photographs of Gailey that she said Polanski had taken and quaalude pills like the one she said the director had given her. “The head of the D.A.’s office there told me to do the search but not to arrest him,” Vannatter recalled. “They said they didn’t want to do an arrest, but to do the case more slowly, through a grand-jury investigation. I was very unhappy when I heard about that. I thought we had plenty of evidence to arrest him, and that’s what I thought we should do.”

So, in the early evening, Vannatter and his partner went to the Beverly Wilshire hotel, in Beverly Hills, where Polanski was staying. “As we were walking through the lobby, I saw Polanski getting out of the elevator,” Vannatter said. “I walked up to him and placed him under arrest. I thought, The heck with this. I wasn’t going to let those D.A.s tell me how to do my job. Why not arrest the guy? Any other person would have been arrested. So I said I’m going to do what is right.

“After I read him his rights, I asked him to take me upstairs to his room, so I could do the search,” Vannatter went on. “I noticed that he had something in his hand, and he was just about to drop it. So I put my hand under his and said, ‘Why don’t you drop it into my hand instead of on the floor?’ ” Polanski placed a single quaalude in Vannatter’s palm.

In Suite 200, Polanski was jittery but coöperative. “As we say on the farm, he was nervous as a hen on a hot rock. He kept asking me for the quaalude back, so he could take it and calm down,” Vannatter said. “By the time we got back to the station house, he told me he had had sex with her.” (The question of exactly when Polanski first admitted having sex with Gailey is a matter of dispute.)

But the case did not end there, and, almost thirty-three years later, it’s still not over. On March 24, 1977, a Los Angeles County grand jury indicted Polanski on six felony counts, including rape by use of drugs and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor. On August 8, 1977, pursuant to a plea bargain, Polanski pleaded guilty to the least serious of the charges against him, having unlawful sex with a minor—statutory rape. On the eve of his sentencing hearing, which was scheduled for February 1, 1978, Polanski fled to Europe, and he has not returned.

Earlier this year, on September 26th, he was detained in Switzerland after American authorities made a provisional request for his arrest. Last week, Polanski’s lawyers provided the deed to his apartment in Paris, the final piece of security to raise $4.5 million for a bail package that had been approved by the local courts. Under the terms of the arrangement, Polanski was then released to house arrest at his chalet, known as Milky Way, in the Swiss ski resort of Gstaad, having spent sixty-seven days in a Zurich detention center. The large amount of bail, and a requirement for him to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet, might seem extreme for a seventy-six-year-old man; but, considering that Polanski is one of the most famous fugitives from American justice in the world, his release from prison under any terms at all may seem like a generous deal for him.

The question of whether Polanski’s celebrity has helped or hurt him hovers over his lengthy legal battle. For Vannatter, the lesson in Polanski’s long flight from justice is that celebrities enjoy special privileges in the legal system—a subject on which he possesses a unique vantage point. Seventeen years after arresting Polanski, Vannatter, with his partner Tom Lange, led the investigation of the murder of O. J. Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. (Simpson was acquitted.) “I just think that celebrities get a sweetheart deal, more than the average guy does,” Vannatter, who retired from the L.A.P.D. in 1996 and moved, part-time, to a farm he bought in Indiana, said. “I never believed in that.”

It is easy to see why Vannatter and many others find such a moral in Polanski’s story. Polanski has enjoyed a comfortable exile in Europe, where until this year he not only avoided prison but continued to make films. For decades, his conviction for a felony sex crime existed mostly as a footnote in a long and eventful life. But the Polanski story suggests an alternative view, too. Over the years, there have also been times when he has been penalized for his celebrity status. Mostly, celebrity warps the criminal process, and not always in a predictable direction. In Polanski’s case, the effect of his celebrity was doubly, and inconsistently, pernicious; it obscured both how badly Polanski treated his young victim and how badly the legal system treated him.

Polanski’s period of house arrest will mark a return to an alpine village that has long been a favorite escape for him. Friends of Polanski brought him to Gstaad to help him recover from his grief over the murder of Sharon Tate. On that visit, in the late sixties, Polanski discovered that Gstaad was, he wrote in an autobiography, “the finishing school capital of the world [with] hundreds of fresh-faced, nubile young girls of all nationalities.” At the time, “Kathy, Madeleine, Sylvia and others whose names I forget played a fleeting but therapeutic role in my life. They were all between sixteen and nineteen years old. . . . They took to visiting my chalet, not necessarily to make love—though some of them did—but to listen to rock music and sit around the fire and talk.” He described sitting in his car outside the schools at night, waiting for his “date” to climb out over the balcony after roll call. At this age, Polanski wrote, the girls “were more beautiful, in a natural, coltish way, than they ever would be again.” The autobiography, “Roman, by Polanski,” was published in 1984, seven years after his guilty plea, and suggests a lack of contrition about his actions. While exile and tragedy have been persistent themes in Polanski’s life, so, too, has a sexual obsession with very young women. He started dating the actress Nastassja Kinski when he was in his mid-forties and she was in her mid-teens. He has been together with his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, since he was fifty-one and she was eighteen.