Director Roman Polanski faces months in Swiss prison
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/pola-s30.shtml
By Hiram Lee
30 September 2009
Filmmaker Roman Polanski could spend months in a Zürich, Switzerland
prison following his September 26 arrest by Swiss authorities at the
behest of the United States government.
The director was taken into custody upon his arrival in Switzerland,
where he was to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Zürich
film festival. The arrest was made on the basis of a request by the
US Justice Department, which wants Polanski extradited to the US to
answer for charges stemming from a 1977 incident which led to the
director pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a minor. Polanski fled
the US in 1978 when it appeared the judge presiding over the case
intended to throw out a plea bargain and sentence Polanski to a
lengthy prison term.
Attorneys for Polanski have acted swiftly to request the release of
their client. The Swiss Federal Criminal Court released a statement
in response to their request, saying simply, "A decision will be made
in the course of the coming weeks." Swiss legal experts say the
release of Polanski on bail or to house arrest is unlikely. A
spokesperson for the Swiss Justice Ministry told the media, "Up to
now there has never been a case of house arrest in such a situation."
The United States has sixty days in which to file a formal
extradition request. Should that time elapse without a request,
Polanski must be set free, though this outcome doesn't seem likely.
He will likely remain in prison in Switzerland, possibly for months,
until the US Justice Department takes steps to return him to the US.
Even were Polanski to be set free in the event that no extradition
request was filed, he could be rearrested and the US would have
another opportunity to file an extradition request.
The arrest of Polanski has drawn protests from an international
community of filmmakers. A petition initiated by the Société des
Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (SACD), an organization
representing filmmakers in France, which demands the "immediate
release" of Polanski, has been signed by a number of prominent
artists including Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Bertrand Tavernier,
Michael Mann, Wes Anderson, David Lynch, Costa-Gavras, Wim Wenders
and Marco Bellocchio. More than 100 filmmakers have signed the
petition as of this writing.
Additionally, the jury presiding over the Zürich film festival has
released its own statement condemning the actions of US and Swiss
authorities, saying the festival has "been exploited in an unfair fashion."
In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, festival jury member
Henning Molfenter declared his intention to boycott the festival,
saying "There is no way I'd go to Switzerland now. You can't watch
films knowing Roman Polanski is sitting in a cell 5 km away."
While the arrest of Polanski seems both sudden and arbitrary, a
number of those protesting the incident have pointed to recent
relations between the US and Switzerland to provide a context.
The US has placed increasing pressure on the Swiss government and the
Swiss bank UBS to reveal the names of American tax evaders believed
to be hiding funds in confidential bank accounts in Switzerland. A
deal between UBS and the United States Internal Revenue Service was
reached in July, in which the bank agreed to turn over the names of
52,000 of its American clients. The decision would seem to violate
banking confidentiality laws that have been on the books since 1934
in Switzerland.
The official story that the arrest was made because this was the
first time US authorities knew exactly where to find Polanski is not
credible. Polanski is a world famous Academy Award-winning film
director who has hardly been hiding in the shadows since 1978. He has
a home in Gstaad, Switzerland and could have been taken into custody
at any point during the past several years.
The Swiss government's willingness to cooperate with the United
States' pursuit of Polanski appears to be an attempt to curry favor
with Washington, perhaps to reduce the pressure on UBS.
Any claims by either the US or Swiss governments that justice is
being served with the arrest of Polanski should be rejected. The
76-year-old artist is clearly not a threat to anyone. Since his
flight from the US in 1978, Polanski has raised a family and
continued his filmmaking career, winning an Academy Award in 2002 for
his direction of The Pianist, a remarkable work based on the life of
classical pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, who, like Polanski himself, was
a survivor of the Holocaust.
There is no social good that can come from Polanski's arrest, nor
does the US Justice Department represent the interests of the victim
in the 1978 trial. Samantha Geimer, the minor at the center of that
trial, now in her 40s, has asked that charges against Polanski be
dropped and that the US government's pursuit of the director come to an end.
--------
Roman Polanski Has a Lot of Friends
by Katha Pollitt
10/01/2009
If a rapist escapes justice for long enough, should the world hand
him a get-out-of-jail-free card? If you're Roman Polanski,
world-famous director, a lot of famous and gifted people think the
answer is yes. Polanski, who drugged and anally raped a
thirteen-year-old girl in 1977 in Los Angeles, pled guilty to the
lesser charge of unlawful sex with a minor and fled to Europe before
sentencing. Now, 32 years later, he's been arrested in Switzerland on
his way to the Zurich film Festival, prompting outrage from
international culture stars: Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, Martin
Scorsese, Pedro Almodavar, Woody Allen (insert your own joke here),
Isabelle Huppert, Diane von Furstenberg and many, many more.
Bernard-Henri Levy, who's taken a leading role in rounding up
support, has said that Polanski "perhaps had committed a youthful
error " (he was 43). Debra Winger, president of the Zurich Film
Festival jury, wearing a red "Free Polanski" badge, called the Swiss
authorities action "philistine collusion." Frederic Mitterand, the
French cultural minister, said it showed "the scary side of America"
and described Polanski as "thrown to the lions because of ancient
history." French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of
Doctors Without Borders, called the whole thing "sinister."
Closer to home, Whoopi Goldberg explained on The View that his crime
wasn't 'rape rape,' just, you know, rape. Oh, that! Conservative
columnist Anne Applebaum minimized the crime in the Washington Post.
First, she overlooks the true nature of the crime (drugs, forced anal
sex, etc), and then claims "there is evidence Polanski did not know
her real age." Talk about a desperate argument. Polanski, who went on
to have an affair with 15-year old Nastassja Kinski, has spoken
frankly of his taste for very young girls. (Nation editor-in-chief
Katrina vanden Heuvel, who tweeted her surprise at finding herself on
the same side as Applebaum, has had second thoughts: "I disavow my
original tweet supporting Applebaum. I believe that Polanski should
not receive special treatment. Question now is how best to ensure
that justice is served. Should he return to serve time? Are there
other ways of seeing that justice is served? At same time, I believe
that prosecutorial misconduct in this case should be investigated.")
On the New York Times op-ed page, schlock novelist Robert Harris
celebrated his great friendship with Polanski, who has just finished
filming one of Harris' books: "His past did not bother me." This
tells us something about Harris' nonchalant view of sex crimes, but
why is it an argument about what should happen in Polanski's legal case?
I just don't get this. I understand that Polanski has had numerous
tragedies in his life, that he's made some terrific movies, that he's
76, that a 2008 documentary raised questions about the fairness of
the judge (see Bill Wyman in Salon, though, for a persuasive
dismantling of its case.). I also understand that his victim, now 44,
says she has forgiven Polanski and wants the case to be dropped
because every time it comes up she is dragged through the mud all
over again. Certainly that is what is happening now. On the
Huffington Post, Polanski fan Joan Z. Shore, who describes herself as
co-founder of Women Overseas for Equality (Belgium), writes: " The
13-year-old model 'seduced' by Polanski had been thrust onto him by
her mother, who wanted her in the movies. The girl was just a few
weeks short of her 14th birthday, which was the age of consent in
California. (It's probably 13 by now!)." Actually, in 1977 the age of
consent in California was 16. Today it's 18, with exceptions for sex
when one person is underage and the other is no more than three years
older. Shore's view--that Polanski was the victim of a nymphet and
her scheming mother--is all over the internet.
Fact: What happened was not some gray, vague he said/she said
Katie-Roiphe-style "bad sex." A 43-year-old man got a 13-year-old
girl alone, got her drunk, gave her a quaalude, and, after checking
the date of her period, anally raped her, twice, while she protested;
she submitted, she told the grand jury "because I was afraid." Those
facts are not in dispute--except by Polanski, who has pooh-poohed the
whole business many times (You can read the grand jury transcripts
here.) He was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge, like many
accused rapists, to spare the victim the trauma of a trial and media
hoopla. But that doesn't mean we should all pretend that what
happened was some free-spirited Bohemian mix-up. The victim took
years to recover.
Fact: In February 2008, LA Superior Court Judge Peter Espinosa ruled
that Polanski can challenge his conviction. All he has to do is come
to the United States and subject himself to the rule of law. Why is
that unfair? Were he not a world-famous director with boatloads of
powerful friends, but just a regular convicted sex criminal who had
fled abroad, would anyone think it was asking too much that he should
go through the same formal process as anyone else?
It's enraging that literary superstars who go on and on about human
dignity, and human rights, and even women's rights (at least when the
women are Muslim) either don't see what Polanski did as rape, or
don't care, because he is, after all, Polanski--an artist like
themselves. That some of his defenders are women is particularly
disappointing. Don't they see how they are signing on to arguments
that blame the victim, minimize rape, and bend over backwards to
exonerate the perpetrator? Error of youth, might have mistaken her
age, teen slut, stage mother--is that what we want people to think
when middle-aged men prey on ninth-graders?
The widespread support for Polanski shows the liberal cultural elite
at its preening, fatuous worst. They may make great movies, write
great books, and design beautiful things, they may have lots of noble
humanitarian ideas and care, in the abstract, about all the right
principles: equality under the law, for example. But in this case,
they're just the white culture-class counterpart of hip-hop fans who
stood by R. Kelly and Chris Brown and of sports fans who
automatically support their favorite athletes when they're accused of
beating their wives and raping hotel workers.
No wonder Middle America hates them.
--------
Bring Polanski to Justice
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090929_bring_polanski_to_justice/
Sep 29, 2009
By Eugene Robinson
Editor's note: For a different take, check out the HBO documentary
"Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired."
Hasn't Roman Polanski suffered enough? Didn't he endure all those
cool, gray, rainy Paris winters? Wasn't he forcedwell, not forced,
but strongly enticedto subsist all those years on overpriced fare
served up by haughty waiters in Michelin-starred restaurants? Didn't
he survive for decades having his vacation options limited,
essentially, to the grim monotony of the south of France?
I've got a better question: Shouldn't Polanski and his many
apologists give us a break?
I'm a huge fan of Polanski's work. "Chinatown" is one of my favorite
movies of all time, "Rosemary's Baby" is a masterpiece, and he richly
deserved the Oscar he won as best director for "The Pianist." He's a
great artist. Maybe his next film will be a prison movie.
Brilliant auteur or no, Polanski has been a fugitive from U.S.
justice since 1978. And there was certainly no artistic merit in the
crime he acknowledged committing: During a photo shoot at the Los
Angeles home of his friend and "Chinatown" star Jack Nicholson,
Polanski plied a 13-year-old girl with champagne and drugs and had
sex with her.
That is grotesque. In general, I agree with the European view that
Americans tend to be prudish and hypocritical about sex. But a grown
man drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl? That's not remotely a
close call. It's wrong in any moral universeand deserves harsher
punishment than three decades of gilded exile.
Polanski went on the lam after pleading guilty to the crime. He had a
deal with prosecutors under which he would essentially walk out of
the courtroom a free manhe had spent 42 days in prison undergoing
psychiatric evaluation, and the arrangement was that he would be
sentenced to time served. But Polanski got wind that the judge in the
case, said to be something of a publicity hound, was going to refuse
to honor the plea bargain and instead impose a prison term. So the
director skipped town and surfaced in France, where authorities ruled
that his crime wasn't covered by extradition treaties with the United States.
He was arrested Sunday in Zurich, where he had traveled to accept an
awardand where the extradition treaty does cover his crime. Assuming
that Polanski puts up a legal fight, it could be months or even years
before he is sent back to the United States.
The Justice Department was right to have Polanski nabbed at the
Zurich airport and should pursue the case to the end. We've waited
this long; we can wait a little longer.
Polanski has dual French-Polish citizenship, and officials in Paris
and Warsaw are outraged. Which makes me outraged. What's their beef?
That Polanski is 76? That he makes great movies? That he only fled to
escape what might well have been an unjust sentence? Sorry, mes amis,
but none of this matters. If you decide to become a fugitive, you
accept the risk that someday you might get caught.
Much has been made of the fact that Polanski's victim, now 45, has
said she no longer feels any anger toward him and does not want to
see him jailed. But it's irrelevant what the victim thinks and feels
as a grown woman. What's important is what she thought and felt at
age 13, when the crime was committed. Those who argue that there's
something unjust about Polanski's arrest are essentially accepting
his argument that it's possible for a 13-year-old girl, under the
influence of alcohol and drugs, to "consent" to sex with a man in his
40s. Or maybe his defenders are saying that drugging and raping a
child is simply not such a big deal.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a huge deal. Even in France, it should
be a big deal. This isn't about a genius who is being hounded for
flouting society's hidebound conventions. It's about a rich and
powerful man who used his fame and position to assaultin every
sense, to violatean innocent child.
And it's about a man who ran away rather than face the consequences
of his actions. Before any sentence could be imposed, he absconded
like a weasel to live a princely life in France.
That's the sort of protagonist, a great director like Polanski must
realize, who doesn't deserve a happy ending.
--
Eugene Robinson's e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.
--------
Refighting the Culture War over Roman Polanski
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/earticle/7464/
The furore over his arrest is not about what happened in LA on 10
March 1977 - it's a pathetic proxy clash between a clapped-out left and right.
Brendan O'Neill
29 September 2009
Should the film director Roman Polanski be extradited to the US over
his statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles in March
1977? It's a potentially interesting legal question. But it's not the
question that is driving the transatlantic furore that followed
Polanski's arrest and imprisonment in Switzerland over the weekend.
Instead, various political prejudices and unresolved battles are
being projected on to L'Affaire Polanski, robbing it of its specific
legal complexities and turning it into the site of a proxy Culture
War in which clapped-out conservatives and disoriented liberals are
hurling intellectual (and not-so-intellectual) hand grenades at one
another. And I find both sides pretty revolting.
--
Polanski, the Polish-French maker of some decent films (Chinatown,
Rosemary's Baby, The Pianist) and some awful ones, too (Frantic, The
Dance of the Vampires), pleaded guilty in a Los Angeles court in 1977
to having sexual intercourse with a minor. On 10 March 1977, then 44
years old, he had taken Samantha Gailey, a 13-year-old child model,
to the home of Jack Nicholson in Mulholland, California, where he
said he was going to take photographs of her for the French edition
of Vogue. After taking the photos, he gave Gailey champagne and a
sedative drug and performed oral sex, intercourse and sodomy on her
while she said: 'No, I don't want to do this.' The original charges
against Polanski were 'rape by use of drugs, sodomy, and a lewd and
lascivious act with a child under the age of 14'; as part of a plea
bargain Polanski got it reduced to 'sexual intercourse with a minor'.
When he realised that even this plea-bargained charge could land him
in jail for many years, he fled the US and has effectively been a
filmmaking fugitive in Europe ever since.
But the miles of newspaper commentary and feverish diplomatic
activity that greeted his arrest in Switzerland have not really been
concerned with the facts of the case, the question of legal
precedents, or the issue of justice. Instead, Polanski has been
turned into a symbol. For conservatives, still convinced that the
Sixties are the root of all evil, he is symbolic of the perversions
allegedly unleashed by the naked, hippyish, free-love liberations of
the countercultural period, with his rape of a 13-year-old girl seen
virtually as the logical end product of legalising drug use and
encouraging people to be sexually experimental. For liberals he is a
symbol of tortured European artistry, who is now being victimised by
an 'ugly' and 'prudish' America which doesn't appreciate great art
(1). For American officials, Polanski is symbolic of European
degeneracy and they fantasise that returning him to an American jail
will be a victory for Reaganite decency over French moral turpitude.
For French officials, meanwhile, Polanski is a symbol of Europe's
gallant recovery from its dark past (Polanski and his family, Polish
Jews, were persecuted during the Holocaust), who is now being
tortured anew by 'the darker side of America, the side that scares us
all' (2). Just as Mia Farrow's Rosemary was a vessel for the devil in
Rosemary's Baby, so Polanski has been turned into a vessel for all
sorts of political jibber jabber today.
It is striking how quickly the discussion of what Polanski, one man,
did to Samantha Gailey, one girl, in a bedroom in 1977 twists and
turns into a discussion about competing moral values and even
clashing national standards. For Sixties-baiting conservatives,
Polanski has long been a rotting symbol of everything that is wrong
with the 1960s. Both Polanski's experience of a terrible crime in
1969 and his execution of a crime in 1977 are held up as evidence of
the darker, destructive side of the 1960s and why a diet of sexual
looseness, rock'n'roll and drugs is a Bad Thing.
In 1969, Polanski's wife Sharon Tate, a beautiful budding actress,
was brutally murdered by Charles Manson's cult, The Family. Family
members stabbed to death Tate and four others at Polanski's home in
California while he was away; Tate was eight-and-a-half months
pregnant at the time. That extraordinary crime, carried out by a tiny
cult of wierd hippies, has long been cited by American conservatives
as the neat conclusion to a decade in which traditional values had
collapsed under the weight of a new generation that was less
respectful, more hedonistic and edgier than its Fifties forebears; it
was the 'dark side of the California dream', as one writer argued, a
product of the 'political, social and cultural turbulence of the
1960s' (3). The Manson crimes have been more analysed and discussed
than any other serial-killing episodes in American history because
they have been elevated from the realm of crime to the world of
politics and morality, used by conservatives both to absolve
themselves of any responsibility for the collapse of traditional
values in the 1960s (instead it was all the fault of The Beatles, the
Beach Boys, drugs and other things loved by Charles Manson) and to
depict sexual liberation and social experimentation as having
necessarily brutal, morally unanchored, murderous consequences.
Yet just as Polanski was a victim of alleged Sixties excesses, so he
was a rapacious product of those excesses, too. Any sympathy for
Polanski quickly dried up following his conviction for unlawful
intercourse in 1977. This, too, conservatives argued, was part of the
degeneracy of the open-minded, open-trousered culture of the American
West Coast in the mid- to late-twentieth century; it sprung from
Polanski's and others' determination to 'push back the boundaries of
sexual liberation', as one report said this week (4). Some American
law enforcers and right-wing commentators seem to imagine that having
Polanski returned to the US will finally bring to an end the odious
influence of the 1960s on contemporary society and morality. Under
the headline 'Why we dislike the French', one conservative American
columnist asks how 'liberal' Europe can 'support a child rapist' (5).
Yet if this attempt to write off 1960s sexual liberation and
experimentation (some of which was progressive, some of which was
solipsistic) on the back of Polanski's past is bad, then the defence
of Polanski by European government officials and commentators is even
worse. They are motivated not by anything remotely related to legal
norms or questions of justice, but by a snobbish and opportunistic
anti-Americanism in which Polanski (who is probably a bit of a creep)
becomes recast as a paragon of European decency against hung-up
America. So determined are some liberal observers to use L'Affaire
Polanski to get one over on America that they have even forgotten
about their normal role of stoking up hysterical panics about
paedophiles and have re-depicted Polanski's encounter with Gailey as
just a somewhat over-exuberant heavy-petting session.
European liberals were super-quick to rally to Polanski's defence
against what Frederic Mitterand, nephew of the former French
president and a close friend of Polanski, described as a 'senseless'
and 'outrageous' arrest that springs from 'the darker side of
America, the one that scares us all' (6). In short, Polanski is not
merely being pursued under an old legalistic arrest warrant, the kind
that exists for many fugitives around the world, but rather is the
European victim of evil and vengeful America. One French commentator
says the US is 'acting out some kind of prudish revenge' against a
'great talent who never abided by American rules' (7). Here,
Polanski's actions in 1977 are presented as a bit of rule-breaking
and anyone who thinks he should be punished for them is clearly an
unarty prude from the dark and scary United States. But whatever you
think of the usefulness of the arrest warrant against Polanski, and
the motivations behind its continued pursuit by American law
enforcers, it is not prudish to think that performing oral sex and
sodomy on a drunk 13-year-old is unacceptable behaviour.
The difference between the liberal media reaction to Polanski and to
someone like Gary Glitter the big-haired glam-rock star who in 1997
was discovered to have child porn on his computer is striking.
Where Glitter has over the past 10 years been turned by the British
media into a symbol of the paedophilic evil that is allegedly
stalking our land, proof that New Labour's sex offenders' register is
not a bloated and fearmongering database after all but a necessary
evil to protect our children from harm, Polanski is presented as the
misunderstood artist who is the real victim here of a
'money-grabbing American mother and a publicity-hungry Californian
judge' (8). So keen are some liberal observers to mark themselves out
as Not American, and to find a new way to lambast the conservative
values of now Republican-ruled California, that they are effectively
saying: 'Polanski might be a paedophile, but he's our paedophile.'
Seemingly lacking the cojones to defend any of the social and sexual
gains of the 1960s openly and loudly, commentators instead seek to
excuse Polanski's behaviour and to demonise the anti-Sixties right-wingers.
But perhaps the worst aspect of the Polanski affair is the
competition of victimhoods. It is testimony to the domination of the
victim culture in contemporary society that both Polanski haters and
Polanski defenders, both sides in this bizarre re-enactment of the
Culture War of the 1960s and its aftermath, have used the language of
victimology to make their case. For many American and British
commentators this is all about Samantha Gailey, whom they have
transformed into the archetypal and eternally symbolic victim of the
alleged great evil of our time, Child Abuse. 'Remember: Polanski
raped a child', says a headline in Salon, in an article that provides
sordid, misery-memoir-style details of what Polanski did with his
penis to Gailey's vagina and anus (9). For European observers, by
contrast, Polanski's actions can be explained by his own victimised
past, especially during the Holocaust. We have to understand his
'life tragedies' and how they moulded him, says one filmmaker (10).
Anne Applebaum, the American commentator who spends much of her time
in Europe, says Polanski fled America in 1978 because of his
'understandable fear of irrational punishment. Polanski's mother died
in Auschwitz. His father survived in Mauthausen. He himself survived
the Krakow ghetto.' (11) (Applebaum fails to disclose that she is
married to the Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, who is
actively campaigning against Polanski's extradition.)
This spat in victimology confirms that the politics of victimhood,
the pursuit of law, politics and morality in the name of respecting
and helping victims, dominates debate on both sides of the Atlantic,
but in the Anglo-American sphere it is the victim of child abuse that
is most sacrosanct, while in Europe it is the victims of the
Holocaust who enjoy the greatest, most unquestioned moral authority
to the extent that Polanski's pretty cowardly fleeing of America in
1978 can be excused as a latent reaction by a tortured man to the
emotional horrors of Auschwitz.
L'Affaire Polanski has become a Culture War that dare not speak its
name, a pale and dishonest imitation of the debates about values and
morality that have emerged at various times over the past 50 years.
As a result we are none the wiser about the legal usefulness of
30-year-old arrest warrants or contemporary extradition laws, as
desperate political observers have instead turned Polanski into
either a ventriloquist's dummy or a voodoo doll for the purposes of
letting off some cheap moral steam.
--------
Polanski Brings Out the Worst in Hollywood
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091001_polanski_brings_out_the_worst_in_hollywood/
Oct 1, 2009
By Eugene Robinson
Could it be that the conservative culture warriors who portray
Hollywood as a cesspool of moral bankruptcy have been right all
along? Not really. But in the case of Roman Polanski, the Puritan
scolds definitely have a point.
Even the French government has backed off its defense of the fugitive
director. Polanski, who has dual French-Polish citizenship, fled the
United States in 1978 before he could be sentenced on a charge of
unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles. He spent the
past three decades mostly in France, and officials in Paris reacted
angrily when he was nabbed at the Zurich airport. In more recent
statements, however, French leaders have taken a much more measured
position, saying that justice should run its course.
But some of Hollywood's most prominent luminaries contend that
Polanski's crimewhich he acknowledged in a guilty pleareally wasn't
so awful. Or that maybe it was a big deal at the time, but now we
should let bygones be bygones. Or that maybe it's still a big deal,
but whatever sins Polanski may have committed are outweighed by the
brilliance of his art.
More than 100 movie-business heavyweightsincluding directors Martin
Scorsese, David Lynch, Mike Nichols and Pedro Almodovarhave signed a
petition calling on Swiss authorities to set Polanski free. Piling
chutzpah upon gall, Woody Allen is among the petitioners. You will
recall that Allen shocked non-Hollywood sensibilities by
acknowledging his romance with Soon-Yi Previn, the daughter of
Allen's longtime companion, Mia Farrow. At the time, Allen was 56 and
Previn was 21.
Actress, comedian and "The View" co-host Whoopi Goldberg has come
under well-justified fire for making a jaw-dropping statement about
Polanski's crime: "I know it wasn't rape-rape. I think it was
something else, but I don't believe it was rape-rape."
Really? The Web site The Smoking Gun has posted the victim's grand
jury testimony and Polanski's admission of guilt. Although a plea
bargain reduced the charges to unlawful sex with a minor, the
documents make clear that what the victim alleged was "rape-rape" of
the vilest kind.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/polanskicover1.html
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0928091polanskiplea1.html
She described being lured by Polanski to the home of actor Jack
Nicholson, given champagne and half a Quaalude, feeling intoxicated
and frightened, being groped in a hot tub, telling Polanski to stop,
being accosted on a couch, telling Polanski again to stop, being
violated in ways I couldn't describe in a family newspaper, and
finally weeping as she waited for her assailant to take her home.
Was Polanski filled with remorse? Not when the British novelist
Martin Amis interviewed him in 1979. "If I had killed somebody, it
wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see?" Polanski
told Amis. "But ... [having sex], you see, and the young girls.
Judges want to [have sex with] young girls. Juries want to [have sex
with] young girls. Everyone wants to [have sex with] young girls!"
For "having sex," he used an Anglo-Saxon vulgarity.
Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, who has been circulating the
pro-Polanski petition, wrote in an Op-Ed in the Independent, a London
newspaper, that "whatever you think about the so-called crime,
Polanski has served his time. A deal was made with the judge, and the
deal is not being honored. ... This is the government of the United
States not giving its word and recanting on a deal, and it is the
government acting irresponsibly and criminally."
So the government is to blame? For apprehending an unrepentant sex
offender who fled before being sentenced for his reprehensible acts?
The Los Angeles Times quoted Weinstein as saying in an interview that
he doesn't believe public opinion is running against Polanskior that
Hollywood is out of step. "Hollywood has the best moral compass,
because it has compassion," Weinstein said, according to the
newspaper. "We were the people who did the fundraising telethon for
the victims of 9/11. We were there for the victims of Katrina and any
world catastrophe."
Hollywood was there, all right, whenever the tragedy was distant, the
victims were anonymous and the "compassionate" concert or telethon
had acceptable production values that made all the stars look their
best. How heroically they rearranged their busy schedules!
The brutalization of one young girl, it seems, leaves Hollywood's big
heart awfully cold.
--
Eugene Robinson's e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.
--------
[See URL for embedded links.]
Reminder: Roman Polanski raped a child
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/09/28/polanski_arrest/
Sept. 28, 2009
by Kate Harding
Roman Polanski raped a child. Let's just start right there, because
that's the detail that tends to get neglected when we start
discussing whether it was fair for the bail-jumping director to be
arrested at age 76, after 32 years in "exile" (which in this case
means owning multiple homes in Europe, continuing to work as a
director, marrying and fathering two children, even winning an Oscar,
but never -- poor baby -- being able to return to the U.S.). Let's
keep in mind that Roman Polanski gave a 13-year-old girl a Quaalude
and champagne, then raped her, before we start discussing whether the
victim looked older than her 13 years, or that she now says she'd
rather not see him prosecuted because she can't stand the media
attention. Before we discuss how awesome his movies are or what the
now-deceased judge did wrong at his trial, let's take a moment to
recall that according to the victim's grand jury testimony, Roman
Polanski instructed her to get into a jacuzzi naked, refused to take
her home when she begged to go, began kissing her even though she
said no and asked him to stop; performed cunnilingus on her as she
said no and asked him to stop; put his penis in her vagina as she
said no and asked him to stop; asked if he could penetrate her
anally, to which she replied, "No," then went ahead and did it
anyway, until he had an orgasm.
Can we do that? Can we take a moment to think about all that, and
about the fact that Polanski pled guilty to unlawful sex with a
minor, before we start talking about what a victim he is? Because
that would be great, and not nearly enough people seem to be doing it.
The French press, for instance (at least according to the British
press) is describing Polanski "as the victim of a money-grabbing
American mother and a publicity-hungry Californian judge." Joan Z.
Shore at the Huffington Post, who once met Polanski and "was utterly
charmed by [his] sobriety and intelligence," also seems to believe
that a child with an unpleasant stage mother could not possibly have
been raped: "The 13-year old model 'seduced' by Polanski had been
thrust onto him by her mother, who wanted her in the movies." Oh,
well, then! If her mom put her into that situation, that makes it
much better! Shore continues: "The girl was just a few weeks short of
her 14th birthday, which was the age of consent in California. (It's
probably 13 by now!) Polanski was demonized by the press, convicted,
and managed to flee, fearing a heavy sentence."
Wow, OK, let's break that down. First, as blogger Jeff Fecke says,
"Fun fact: the age of consent in 1977 in California was 16. It's now
18. But of course, the age of consent isn't like horseshoes or global
thermonuclear war; close doesn't count. Even if the age of consent
had been 14, the girl wasn't 14." Also, even if the girl had been old
enough to consent, she testified that she did not consent. There's
that. Though of course everyone makes a bigger deal of her age than
her testimony that she did not consent, because if she'd been 18 and
kept saying no while he kissed her, licked her, screwed her and
sodomized her, this would almost certainly be a whole different story
-- most likely one about her past sexual experiences and drug and
alcohol use, about her desire to be famous, about what she was
wearing, about how easy it would be for Roman Polanski to get
consensual sex, so hey, why would he need to rape anyone? It would
quite possibly be a story about a wealthy and famous director who
pled not guilty to sexual assault, was acquitted on "she wanted it"
grounds, and continued to live and work happily in the U.S. Which is
to say that 30 years on, it would not be a story at all. So it's much
safer to focus on the victim's age removing any legal question of
consent than to get tied up in that thorny "he said, she said" stuff
about her begging Polanski to stop and being terrified of him.
Second, Polanski was "demonized by the press" because he raped a
child, and was convicted because he pled guilty. He "feared heavy
sentencing" because drugging and raping a child is generally frowned
upon by the legal system. Shore really wants us to pity him because
of these things? (And, I am not making this up, boycott the entire
country of Switzerland for arresting him.)
As ludicrous as Shore's post is, I have to agree with Fecke that my
favorite Polanski apologist is the Washington Post's Anne Applebaum,
who finds it "bizarre" that anyone is still pursuing this case. And
who also, by the by, failed to disclose the tiny, inconsequential
detail that her husband, Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski,
is actively pressuring U.S. authorities to drop the case.
There is evidence of judicial misconduct in the original trial.
There is evidence that Polanski did not know her real age. Polanski,
who panicked and fled the U.S. during that trial, has been pursued by
this case for 30 years, during which time he has never returned to
America, has never returned to the United Kingdom., has avoided many
other countries, and has never been convicted of anything else. He
did commit a crime, but he has paid for the crime in many, many ways:
In notoriety, in lawyers' fees, in professional stigma. He could not
return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar. He cannot visit
Hollywood to direct or cast a film.
There is also evidence that Polanski raped a child. There is evidence
that the victim did not consent, regardless of her age. There is
evidence -- albeit purely anecdotal, in this case -- that only the
most debased crapweasel thinks "I didn't know she was 13!" is a
reasonable excuse for raping a child, much less continuing to rape
her after she's said no repeatedly. There is evidence that the
California justice system does not hold that "notoriety, lawyers'
fees and professional stigma" are an appropriate sentence for child rape.
But hey, he wasn't allowed to pick up his Oscar in person! For the
love of all that's holy, hasn't the man suffered enough?
Granted, Roman Polanski has indeed suffered a great deal in his life,
which is where Applebaum takes her line of argument next:
He can be blamed, it is true, for his original, panicky decision to
flee. But for this decision I see mitigating circumstances, not least
an understandable fear of irrational punishment. Polanski's mother
died in Auschwitz. His father survived Mauthausen. He himself
survived the Krakow ghetto, and later emigrated from communist Poland.
Surviving the Holocaust certainly could lead to an "understandable
fear of irrational punishment," but being sentenced for pleading
guilty to child rape is basically the definition of rational
punishment. Applebaum then points out that Polanski was a suspect in
the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, a crime actually
committed by the Manson family -- but again, that was the unfortunate
consequence of a perfectly rational justice system. Most murdered
pregnant women were killed by husbands or boyfriends, so that
suspicion was neither personal nor unwarranted. This isn't Kafkaesque stuff.
But what of the now-45-year-old victim, who received a settlement
from Polanski in a civil case, saying she'd like to see the charges
dropped? Shouldn't we be honoring her wishes above all else?
In a word, no. At least, not entirely. I happen to believe we should
honor her desire not to be the subject of a media circus, which is
why I haven't named her here, even though she chose to make her
identity public long ago. But as for dropping the charges, Fecke said
it quite well: "I understand the victim's feelings on this. And I
sympathize, I do. But for good or ill, the justice system doesn't
work on behalf of victims; it works on behalf of justice."
It works on behalf of the people, in fact -- the people whose laws in
every state make it clear that both child rape and fleeing
prosecution are serious crimes. The point is not to keep 76-year-old
Polanski off the streets or help his victim feel safe. The point is
that drugging and raping a child, then leaving the country before you
can be sentenced for it, is behavior our society should not -- and at
least in theory, does not -- tolerate, no matter how famous, wealthy
or well-connected you are, no matter how old you were when you
finally got caught, no matter what your victim says about it now, no
matter how mature she looked at 13, no matter how pushy her mother
was, and no matter how many really swell movies you've made.
Roman Polanski raped a child. No one, not even him, disputes that.
Regardless of whatever legal misconduct might have gone on during his
trial, the man admitted to unlawful sex with a minor. But the
Polanski apologism we're seeing now has been heating up since "Roman
Polanski: Wanted and Desired," the 2008 documentary about Polanski's
fight to get the conviction dismissed. Writing in Salon, Bill Wyman
criticized the documentary's whitewashing of Polanksi's crimes last
February, after Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza ruled that if the
director wanted to challenge the conviction, he'd need to turn
himself in to U.S. authorities and let the justice system sort it
out. "Fugitives don't get to dictate the terms of their case ...
Polanski deserves to have any potential legal folderol investigated,
of course. But the fact that Espinoza had to state the obvious is
testimony to the ways in which the documentary, and much of the media
coverage the director has received in recent months, are bizarrely skewed."
The reporting on Polanski's arrest has been every bit as "bizarrely
skewed," if not more so. Roman Polanski may be a great director, an
old man, a husband, a father, a friend to many powerful people, and
even the target of some questionable legal shenanigans. He may very
well be no threat to society at this point. He may even be a good
person on balance, whatever that means. But none of that changes the
basic, undisputed fact: Roman Polanski raped a child. And rushing
past that point to focus on the reasons why we should forgive him,
pity him, respect him, admire him, support him, whatever, is
absolutely twisted.
--------
Also, see:
The best Polanski you might have missed
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/10/02/polanski_round_up/index.html
.
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