Late last year, the director filed a libel action in England against Vanity Fair. In the process of defending the magazine, Vanity Fair’s lawyers filed a motion to have the long-sealed grand jury testimony of Polanski’s victim unsealed. They were successful, which meant that those frisky folks at The Smoking Gun could get their hands on the testimony.

“When we heard all this stuff about us being part of a smear campaign, we thought, ‘That’s just insane,’ ” The Smoking Gun’s Bill Bastone told The Scoop. “People want to believe that there’s this overarching conspiracy and there are these munchkins at Miramax leaking this stuff to us. We wish! We wish we were in that sort of a loop. It was just us doing what we do. . . . The irony of all ironies is that if Roman Polanski had not filed the action, those papers would not have got out in the first place.”

At the time of his suit, it was reported that Polanski sued Vanity Fair because he feared that the magazine’s article might damage his reputation come Oscar time. (Read more at MSNBC.com.)