It's distasteful and rather appalling. Almost like a movie by, er, Roman Polanski. But it's an interesting situation. The reactions are not, for once, political. Even The View's Sherri Shepherd weighed in, on Tweeter:
"Whew...hot debate over the Statutory [sic] Rapist Polanski. 45 year old man plies a 13yr old w/drugs & Liquor and anally & orally penetrates her w/o her consent is a RAPIST....We hunt down 75 year old Nazis. We must protect our children."
Just as a point of information and law, the rape was not statutory. The
lesser charge to which Polanski was allowed to plea was not statutory because no one suggested it had been consensual sex reworded as statutory rape because of the girl's age. In open court he He acknowledged that he had drugged, sodomized and raped a 13-year-old girl despite her verbalized requests to the contrary.
And now Polanski is being detained in a Swiss jail while Switzerland and the U.S. engage in legal arguments as to whether he will be deported to finally charges and sentencing from his 1977 rape conviction subsequent evading charges and sentencing.
There is no debate even from Polanski himself that he drugged, sodomized and raped a 13-year-old girl. Thirteen is very young even in jaded and drug-worn L.A. It was inexcusable and disgusting and horrible. But apparently there is debate over how he should be handled now, 32 years later. But why now? Because the Swiss want to honor his films? Because Swiss banks keep a lot of peoples' money and want to avoid international monetary sanctions? Seriously: why now??
Despite wowing audiences and critics for decades, many of Polanski's films are fiendishly violent psychological portraits of very nasty people. Which has no bearing on the subject at hand, I suppose, but it's hard not to think there's a connection somewhere.
If you or I or your neighbor did what he did, you or I or he would be locked up, never to see the light of day except for a daily hour in the prison yard.
My questions (well, some of my questions):
(1) Should a person's talent, fame and and money be tickets to freedom from legal responsibility for one's actions?
(2) Should a victim's success in putting a life back together be what it takes to let a perpetrator off the hook?
(3) And if time eradicates the need to punish personal and heinous crime, why punish anyone for such offenses? Why not just put them on a desert island - or let them go away to Europe until the intensity of the moment passes?
(4) But why is Polanski being re-custody-ed now? It's never been a mystery even to casual readers of newspapers and magazines where he was, particularly when he showed up at various award ceremonies during the 31 years since his conviction?
(5) If politics makes strange bedfellows, what do you call it when Woody Allen (whose films are often unarguably brilliant but whose personal life has left something to be, er, desired) is among those publicly entreating the two countries to release Polanski and allow him to get on with his life?
(6) How much fame and talent means a person can commit crimes at will?
(7) And what about the girl's mother? Why wasn't she charged with aiding the crime? What on earth could her plan have been as she dropped off her 13-year-old at the house of two famously drug-taking and sexually adventurous womanizers??
Further reading:
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L.A. Times - long article + Geimer's 1977 testimony + the list of petition signers
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11D - post and several comments
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U.K.'s Guardian article
Labels: people of note, puzzles
