Why would Roman Polanski want to come back to the United States when he's apparently the boss of France?
Not needing any ghostwriter, the aging fugitive penned a letter to President Barack Obama asking for leniency in his 32-year-old child-sex case, and somehow got French President Nicolas Sarkozy to hand-deliver it to our commander-in-chief last week, the Daily Beast reports.
According to a short item in the French paper L'Express, Polanski stated in his bold communiqué that he felt the 47 days he spent behind bars in California in 1977 when he was first busted for having sex with a 13-year-old girl, plus the two months he spent in a Swiss jail last year, should suffice as punishment.
A spokesman for Obama's press office had not heard of any such letter as of Monday afternoon. Polanski's attorney declined to comment.
But L'Express reported that Sarkozy handed the missive over to Obama during last week's nuclear safety summit in Washington. It remains unclear, however, how Polanski got the letter to Sarkozy in the first place.
Since fleeing the U.S. in 1978 before he was due to be sentenced for having unlawful intercourse with a minor, Polanski has maintained a permanent residence in France and has dual Polish and French citizenship.
His American attorneys have been busy trying to get his case thrown out for more than a year now, their argument that L.A. authorities stopped pursuing Polanski long ago perhaps prompting the legal action overseas that led to the director's current "imprisonment" at his vacation chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland.
Though the details of this exchange are still cloudy, this wouldn't be the first time that the French elite has stuck its neck out for Polanski.
Last year, revered author Bernard Henri Lévy posted a letter Polanski wrote him on the Huffington Post in order to give his friend a forum to thank his many supporters.
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Get caught up on the 21st-century chapter of the Polanski saga right here.