[6 articles] 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 http://www.thenation.com/blogs/anotherthing/479379/roman_polanski_has_a_lot_of_friends?rel=emailNation 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 . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
