Attorneys for Roman Polanski are accusing Los Angeles County prosecutors of misconduct, as part of their continued efforts to have a decades-old sexual assault case against the Oscar-winning director dismissed.
The Los Angeles Times reported that Polanski's legal team filed court papers Monday that allege district attorneys and judges carried out "serious misconduct" in an effort to prosecute the filmmaker and later force him to return to the United States. The 133-page motion seeks an evidentiary hearing to determine whether an allegedly "false" extradition request sent this year by the Department of Justice to the Polish government requires dismissal of the case against Polanski.
A spokeswoman for the district attorney's office did not immediately return a call from The Associated Press for comment Tuesday morning.
Polanski fled Los Angeles for France in the 1970s. The filings come more than three decades after the director of "Chinatown" and "Rosemary's Baby" fled Los Angeles for France after he was charged with raping and sodomizing a 13-year-old girl during a photo shoot.
He was never formally sentenced after pleading guilty to one count of statutory rape, but did serve nearly two months in a state prison for psychological testing. Polanski was arrested in 2009 by Swiss authorities at the request of the United States, but then released.
