Roman Polanski wins privacy damages

Roman Polanski, who faces extradition to the United States over charges relating to sex with a 13-year-old girl 33 years ago, has finally won a legal victory of his own. Four French publications have been ordered to pay him privacy damages for printing photographs of him and his family.
 
The €16,000 that will be paid to Polanski by the celebrity magazines VSD and Voici and France's main Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche includes legal costs and is substantially less than the €75,000 the Oscar-winning film director had originally requested.
 
But the Paris court which decided in Polanski's favour on Tuesday said the photos taken during the 76-year-old's house arrest in Gstaad, Switzerland, were part of a "media show" that had come at a "difficult time in the personal life of those concerned".
 
The judge ruled that certain photos of Polanski had been legitimate, including ones of the director standing in the window of his Gstaad ski chalet. However she said that images published of Polanski with his wife, the French actress and singer Emmanuelle Seigner, and their children Elvis and Morgane, were "neither necessary nor useful for legitimate public understanding". As minors, Polanski's son and daughter are especially protected by France's stringent privacy rules.
 
VSD was told to pay €5,500 for publishing photos of Morgane and Elvis at Zurich airport despite the children's faces being blurred. Voice, meanwhile, was ordered to pay €1,000 for printing a photo of Seignier walking in the street. Le Journal du Dimanche was also ordered to pay €3,000 in damages.
 
The decision comes after a separate ruling last week which saw the French daily newspaper Aujourd'hui en France ordered to pay €4,500 to Polanski for printing pictures of him in Gstaad in its Paris edition Le Parisien.
 
Polanski will find out on Friday whether he can be sentenced in absentia for having sex with a minor in California in 1977, following a suggestion by a California appeals court. ·