So, okay…I guess I’m on board when authorities grab some 95-year-old codger out of his retirement community in Boca Raton because he was a Nazi death camp guard way back in the 1940s, causing untold misery before escaping to America for a peaceful, happy life on the bones of his victims. After all, there’s no statute of limitations on murder.
And it’s not that I condone grown men having sex with 13 year old girls, even in 1970s Hollywood.
But…really? In the age of Al-Qaeda and zillion dollar international Ponzi schemes, the world is still devoting investigative resources to busting Roman Frickin’ Polanski?
I mean, Polanski’s victim Samantha Geimer, now middle-aged, has long since forgiven the director and moved on with her life. Not only that, but Polanski already served more than a month in prison for his crime — more time than, say, Cheney will ever serve for shooting an old guy in the face and, oh yeah, inventing a war.
And, I mean, not that it excuses his actions, but Polanski did lose a mother to the Nazis and a wife to the Mansons, which may have led the director to some pretty dark psychological places…but as Geimer herself has said, “I don’t think he’s a danger to society. I don’t think he needs to be locked up forever and no one has ever come out ever – besides me – and accused him of anything. It was 30 years ago now.”
But, nope: sometimes the cops just get a boner for a case, especially if the perp is high profile, non-violent and easy to catch. A few months back, for example, graffitti artist Shepard Fairey — the guy who did the iconic Obama “Hope” poster — was busted in Boston at an Institute of Contemporary Art exhibit of his art for the crime of plastering Andre the Giant’s mug on a railroad trestle.
Graffiti is hardly statutory rape, of course, but in the interests of trying out a brand new pop culture colloquialism I’ve just invented, I’d say Fairey got totally Polanskied at the ICA, in the same way the beleaguered state of California now has to waste valuable time and resources after the recent Polanskification of a certain world-famous director in Zurich.
There was a time, back in 1977, when the central issue of the case was that Polanski had pled guilty to statutory rape (as part of a deal that got the more egregious charges against him dropped).
Today, the central issue ought to be that the man has already served his time: he spent more than 40 days locked up in a maximum security prison undergoing “psychiatric evaluation.” In the doc “Wanted and Desired”, both the prosecution and defense attorneys agree that this was the full sentence both the DA’s department and the advising psychiatrists wanted, and that the only reason it was presented as anything other than a prison sentence was that the judge (since deceased) was a publicity hog and got cute in hopes of keeping the media spotlight on him a little longer.
The judge had openly agreed to let Polanski go after the 42 days were up, and everyone agrees that after the press made noises about how the little pervert deserved worse than he got, His Honor informed lawyers on both sides that he was breaking his word and planning to send Polanski BACK into maximum security,
In the documentary, the prosecutor remembers the defense attorney asking him what he thought of it all, and the prosecutor says that, to his personal regret, he said that if Polanski was his client, he’d have to advise him to give up on any hope of getting justice and to just make a run for it. Unless you think that a man who’s done his time should be retried and resentenced for the same crime, over and over in perpetuity, this isn’t a case about a guy who did the crime and tried to weasel out of doing the crime. It’s a case of somebody who’s still being punished for having gotten on the wrong side of a douchebag in a robe. (Phil Nugent)
Don’t y’all know that instead of citing the facts of the case or talking about what the concept like justice means in this situation, you’re supposed to start screaming “HE! RAPED! A! CHILD!” and demanding his head on a stick? Catch up with the rest of the Internet, kiddos.