Something wildly unexpected happened the other day: film director
Roman Polanski was taken into custody in Switzerland for his rape of a
13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson's house in 1977. The grand jury
transcript is stomach-turning. His victim, Samantha Gailey, said the
director plied her with champagne and drugs and asked her to remove her
clothes for pictures in a hot tub. Polanski then had sex with her
despite her resistance and requests to be taken home. He pleaded guilty
to the lesser offense of sex with a minor, but fearing a prison term,
he fled the country.
Now something utterly expected is happening:
morally bankrupt libertines in Hollywood and other artistic banana
republics are rushing to Polanski's defense.
Welcome to the world of Roman Polanski, Child Rapist/Victim.
Has-been
actress Debra Winger joined the first line of ludicrous defense, since
she was president of the jury of the Zurich Film Festival, where
Polanski was headed to receive a lifetime achievement award when he was
apprehended. Let's hope Winger is never allowed to serve on a real
jury. She simply doesn't care about Polanski's guilt. He is a filmmaker
and an artist, and for this crowd anything and everything goes.
Winger
denounced Swiss authorities for their "philistine collusion" in
arresting Polanski, and then whined that "this fledgling festival has
been unfairly exploited, and whenever this happens the whole art world
suffers." Of Polanski, she declared with a flourish: "We stand by and
await his release and his next masterwork."
The Huffington
Post, the Internet's most infamous hangout for deranged celebrities,
carried a series of pathetic Polanski defenses. Winning the Artists Are
Above The Law Award was an ambitious film critic named Kim Morgan, who grotesquely channeled the Winger vibe [1]:
"I've always contended that Polanski has depicted women with
complication, humanity, ugliness and most important, empathy. Polanski
is an artist, an acute observer of life's darkness and absurdities on
the level of Dostoevsky or Nietzsche."
Yes, that Polanski was so full of empathy as he ignored the little girl repeatedly saying "No" while he molested her.
She
then wrote "I write this not to defend statutory rape, I write this to
study the visions of a troubled, talented human being, a human being
who has gone through real horror himself and a human being who also
happens to be one of the greatest filmmakers alive." But she also said
she opposed his arrest. She was defending a rapist - but not statutory
rape, see.
An even bigger lout is Miramax studio boss Harvey
Weinstein, who organized a petition of filmmakers to demand freedom for
Polanski: "Whatever you think about the so-called crime, Polanski has
served his time." (He served 42 days before he skipped out on
sentencing.) Polanski is not only excused because he is an "artist," he
is a "humanist" and even a "scapegoat." Weinstein supported a
documentary last year arguing that the real injustice came not from the
rape, but from the oppression of Polanski by his
prosecutors/persecutors in Los Angeles.
Weinstein compounded the
foolishness by circulating a petition of famous directors who've joined
the protest. Amazingly, the list includes Woody Allen, another famous
dirty old man in Hollywood, who scandalously carried on a sexual
relationship with an adopted stepdaughter 34 years his junior, and then
married her.
Then there's Whoopi Goldberg, whose defense of Polanski on ABC's "The View" [2]
was that "it wasn't rape-rape," since he pleaded guilty to sex with a
minor. Earth To Whoopi: It was statutory rape. It was non-consensual.
Whoopi claimed everybody needed to wait for facts, even though the
facts of the rape are crystal clear, as is the justice this man tried
to evade. None of that matters to her.
Amoral Whoopi also trotted
out the "Europe favors pedophilia" defense: "We're a different kind of
society. We see things differently. The world sees 13 year olds and 14
year olds - in the rest of Europe, they are seen, often times [as
adults] ..I do know that not everybody agrees with the way we see
things."
She has a point there. In France, the culture minister is outraged: "scary America...has just shown its face."
For
his part, Polanski was always mystified that anyone cared about his
hideous, felonious behavior. He thought everyone wanted to do what he
did, as he proclaimed in an interview with novelist Martin Amis in
1979: "If I had killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to
the press, you see? But... f--ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges
want to f-- young girls. Juries want to f-- young girls. Everyone
wants to f-- young girls!"
But as more than one Catholic leader has observed, what if his name were Father Roman Polanski? Oh, then they'd all be singing a different tune, wouldn't they? Hypocrites.
