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Repulsion
By Jeff Fecke | September 29, 2009
The fallout from the arrest of Roman Polanski has been interesting and, in many ways, heartening. While there have been many posts defending Polanski — I touched on some yesterday, as did the redoubtable Kate Harding — most bloggers on the left and the right alike have condemned Polanski and praised the arrest. I know, one shouldn’t be surprised that there’s general consensus that someone who drugs and rapes a child, then flees jurisdiction to avoid punishment is someone who probably deserves to be arrested, but it’s still nice to see.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that everyone sees things this way. The film and artistic community, alas, seems to feel that raping a 13-year-old girl is okay if it happened a long time ago, and the perpetrator is famous. Even the liberal Huffington Post has been an epicenter of this activity, mainly because Arianna Huffington has a lot of famous friends who don’t seem to understand why it is that people would want a child rapist brought to justice. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy gives us the usual run-down:
Apprehended like a common terrorist Saturday evening, September 26, as he came to receive a prize for his entire body of work, Roman Polanski now sleeps in prison.
He risks extradition to the United States for an episode that happened years ago and whose principal plaintiff repeatedly and emphatically declares she has put it behind her and abandoned any wish for legal proceedings.
Seventy-six years old, a survivor of Nazism and of Stalinist persecutions in Poland, Roman Polanski risks spending the rest of his life in jail for deeds which would be beyond the statute-of-limitations in Europe.
We ask the Swiss courts to free him immediately and not to turn this ingenious filmmaker into a martyr of a politico-legal imbroglio that is unworthy of two democracies like Switzerland and the United States. Good sense, as well as honor, require it.
Interesting how Lévy sort of elides a few things, such as:
- The crime Polanski committed
- The fact that Polanski pled guilty to the crime
- The fact that Polanski is only beyond the statute of limitations because he’s successfully dodged extradition for 30-plus years
- The fact that the vast majority of Holocaust and Stalinism survivors aren’t rapists
- The fact that common criminals are often apprehended like common criminals
Lévy then helpfully provides a list of artists and filmmakers who you can safely avoid doing business with, including Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, Pascal Bruckner, Neil Jordan, Isabelle Adjani, Arielle Dombasle, Isabelle Huppert, William Shawcross, Yamina Benguigui, Mike Nichols, Danièle Thompson, Diane von Furstenberg, Claude Lanzmann, and Paul Auster.
Ultimately, I think the phrase “common terrorist” at the start of Lévy’s screed gets to the heart of the difference of opinion between the European view of this matter and the American one. There is much to like about Europe, but there is no question that culturally, there is a more rigidly defined hierarchy of classes. Polanski is part of the “right kind of people,” and therefore his sins can be forgiven, ignored, swept under the rug.
American culture is not so willing to ignore criminal conduct. Note: I didn’t say totally unwilling. Being rich and powerful can get you out of punishment, whether you’re O.J. Simpson or Ted Kennedy or Dick Cheney. But there is at the very least the notion that this is a bad thing, that justice should, in theory, treat all criminals the same. That a rich, powerful child rapist is no better than a poor child rapist, and that each should face equal punishment.
Reading Lévy’s post and others like it, I don’t get the sense that Polanski defenders believe this. I think they feel that Roman is a famous guy who’s made great art, and all he did was have a little sex with an underage girl, so hey, why not just forget it? Why arrest him as if he was a criminal, when he’s really a swell guy?
Well, because he is a criminal. A confessed one, one who refused to serve his sentence. One who has been evading justice for three decades.
Now, justice may take the form of Polanski having the charges dropped; there is at least some evidence that there were ex parte communications between the prosecutor and the Judge in the case. I’m not an attorney and don’t know how California courts would remedy that, but I do know that they can’t remedy that so long as Polanski refuses to stand up and face the court. By his stubborn refusal to come back and deal with legal matters through legal channels, Polanski acted as a common criminal. And criminals get arrested; I’m sorry, M. Lévy, but they do.
Finally, I find amusing the fact that Polanski is probably in jail today specifically because of the actions of his attorneys:
Roman Polanski’s attorneys may have helped provoke his arrest by complaining to an appellate court this summer that Los Angeles prosecutors had never made any real effort to arrest the filmmaker in his three decades as a fugitive, two sources familiar with the case told The Times.
The accusation that the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office was not serious about extraditing Polanski was a small part of two July court filings by the director’s attorneys. But it caught the attention of prosecutors and led to his capture in Switzerland on Saturday, the sources said.
Polanski, 76, was taken into custody at the airport in Zurich, where he was scheduled to headline the city’s film festival. Details of his appearance were widely available on the Internet. Variety also reported his planned attendance in August, the month after Polanski’s attorneys had filed two separate documents with the 2nd District of the state Court of Appeal asking for a dismissal of the 32-year-old child sex case against the filmmaker.
In both, the lawyers alleged that the district attorney’s office in effect benefited from Polanski’s absence, because as long as he remained a fugitive, officials could avoid answering allegations of prosecutorial and judicial wrongdoing in the original handling of the case.
Yeah, you know, that was probably a really stupid thing to argue. My guess is that to some extent, the L.A. District Attorney’s office was letting this go, not so much because they didn’t believe in the case but because it’s a hassle to try to get someone arrested overseas and then extradited to the U.S. But when you argue that there’s a conspiracy to try to cover up wrongdoing in the case, and that’s why nobody’s trying to bring your client in, you’d better be damn sure that’s the reason why nobody’s trying to bring your client in. If it isn’t, there’s a good chance that the prosecutor will go after your client, hard, to prove they have nothing to hide. And that’s doubly true if your client is a child rapist.
Topics: Sexual Assault | 6 Comments »
September 29th, 2009 at 11:53 am
I agree with every point you, and others, have made. What Polanski did was both horrid and immoral.
But I have one question; what does his arrest and imprisonment accomplish? I am not saying it doesn’t accomplish anything, it is just, with everything I have read, no one has made a case based on what is accomplished with his arrest. Convince me of the benefit of this whole situation that is currently distracting us from important, crucial matters.
Like the disappearance of white girls, it is horrible, regrettable. Unfortunately, it solves nothing and does distract people from current horrors.
September 29th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
I just found your website a la Kate Harding’s article and I agree with you one hundred percent. As you say, one shouldn’t be surprised at the consensus people are coming to regarding someone who rapes a child, but it is still worth commenting on. It makes me feel that much better about the world we live in.
September 29th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Rook, what is accomplished is a showing that the rich, talented, and famous are not given a pass for their crimes. That seems to me to be an important matter.
October 1st, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Rook – If Polanski is not arrested, it sets a precedent for other rape cases. It’s basically telling everyone that you can get away with rape if you manage to stay away from the US long enough.
October 2nd, 2009 at 9:15 am
Sets a precedent? Seriously, have you not paid attention to the history of mankind? The so called precedent you speak of already exists, has existed, and will always exist.
If people want vengeance, fine. But this whole action fails to take into account the affect this has on the one true victim, who by most accounts has moved on. So, to prevent a setting of precedent we need to drag the victim through another court case, where she can testify all over again about her rape. What justice is there in that?
Also, if you like, apply that same reasoning to capital punishment. Because, you know, since it’s reinstatement, I’ve noticed a substantial decrease in crime (imagine a heavy tone of sarcasm at this point).
In any case, dragging this woman through hell again simply for a concept that does not work is wrong.
October 3rd, 2009 at 4:01 am
What it accomplishes is to send the message that being rich does not get one out of one’s obligation to the law; being famous does not get one out of rape.
Jail has two goals: to punish, and to rehabilitate. Punishment is not an evil goal. When you break society’s rules to the extreme level Polanski did, you deserve jail. More than that, in order to keep people like Polanski from doing what Polanski did, Polanski needs to be jailed so people know they will be punished if they do what he did.
As for capital punishment, it doesn’t have a stronger deterrent effect that life without parole, and it’s irreversible; hence, I oppose it. But I oppose it on those grounds. Ethically, you better believe I think Ted Bundy willingly revoked his membership in the human race. And I would have slept soundly after flipping the switch. Unfortunately, most death penalty cases are not as clear-cut as Bundy’s, and I’d rather the Bundys of the world lived so no innocent person was put to death.