Model Vindicates Polanski

Mon., Jul. 25, 2005 10:15 AM PDT by Josh Grossberg

Sure, Roman Polanski is an admitted horn dog. But he's nowhere near as skeevy as Vanity Fair made him out to be.

The Oscar winner, who scored a big legal win against the magazine on Friday, when a British court found Vanity Fair had libeled him, has just notched a moral victory.

The Norwegian woman at the center of the case--whom, per Vanity Fair, Polanski tried to seduce on his way to the funeral of his murdered wife, Sharon Tate, in 1969--has come forward to discredit the magazine's account of her meeting with the filmmaker.

In an interview with London's Mail from her Oslo home Sunday, Beatte Telle, now 59, said that Polanski never attempted to woo her or vow "to make another the next Sharon Tate" of the former model, as originally reported by Vanity Fair in a July 2002 article.

Telle had declined to testify in the trial. Instead, Vanity Fair admitted to pinning its story on Harper's editor of Lewis Lapham, who claimed he witnessed the Chinatown helmer make "tasteless and vulgar" sexual advances toward Telle.

Lapham said in court that Polanski put his hand on the Scandinavian beauty's leg, praised her beauty and promised to put her in the movies, saying he could make her "another Sharon Tate."

The magazine also called Telle's ex-boyfriend, financier Edward Perlberg, who was present during the encounter at Elaine's restaurant in New York. He testified that Telle had recounted to him a similar version of events.

Eventually, the magazine admitted it may have messed up the time line of events after Polanski's legal team showed the director didn't stop over in New York on his way to Tate's funeral. The magazine tried to spin its defense, saying that the director was an inveterate womanizer, adulterer and fugitive from justice. (Polanski was allowed to beam his testimony from France so he wouldn't risk extradition from England to the United States on a decades-old statutory-rape conviction.)

A British jury found that Vanity Fair's lapses were inexcusable and ordered publisher Cond? Nast to pay the 71-year-old auteur $90,000 in damages for a story he called "abominable lie" that dishonored the memory of the actress, who was slain by Charles Manson's cult.

Telle, a former catwalker with New York's Ford agency, told the Mail that attorneys for Vanity Fair repeatedly attempted to get her to testify, but she blew them off. The ex-model also received a letter from Perlberg asking her to back his claims.

"I just thought, 'If you remember so much about it than you talk about it in court. It isn't how I remembered it,' " she said.

Telle, who now resides with her ailing mother in an Oslo suburb, remembered that she was dressed like a "beatnik" and wore her hair "very long" when Polanski approached her table.

"Roman Polanski came over to the table when I was eating and it was as if he tried to say something but he didn't," she said. "He never said that he would 'make me another Sharon Tate' or that he would make me a star. He never spoke to me at all.

"Polanski just stood there. He just stared at me for ages. Perhaps I reminded him of Sharon Tate."

It wasn't until later, while taking a cab home, that Perlberg informed her the strange man staring at her was the famed filmmaker.

Telle told the newspaper she was pleased Polanski won his case. "I'm smiling. He didn't touch me, he just didn't. I'm so happy."