It speaks volumes that reports of the latest failed attempt to bring the rapist and sodomizer Roman Polanski to justice found their way this week into the Style section of the Washington Post (page 3). In other words, the news that a famous director remains at large despite his crimes wasn’t quite serious enough to make it to the actual … news sections. More in the gossip line of spicy tidbits, like the personal problems of, say, Lindsay Lohan, who drinks too much. Or Alec Baldwin’s big bad mouth.
But Polanski, unlike Lohan (who never raped anyone), is not about to go to jail. Swiss officials, who refused this week to extradite him to Los Angeles, scene of the long-ago crime, made certain of that. Gone is the inelegant ankle bracelet that was supposed to track the director’s every move. Finished is Polanski’s chalet-arrest. France, Polanski’s delightful haven and enabler, will welcome him back.
The pretext of Swiss justice officials for this remarkable decision? They didn’t have enough information on what transpired between the director and a 13-year-old more than three decades ago; and they weren’t given the full details about what occurred subsequently. The Swiss justice minister, the unfortunately named Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, decided the extradition warrant was meager in its details: how, she wondered, was she to determine the merits of the case?
By reading the same documents available to the rest of the universe, perhaps?
Years and years ago, before Widmer-Schlumpf climbed to the top of the Swiss justice system, Polanski talked frankly and openly to LA probation officers about exactly what he had done at the home of the actor Jack Nicholson after he drugged a young girl who was modeling for him. Sex with the child, he said blandly, “was very spontaneous.” In a court hearing, he admitted knowing the actual age of his victim at the time of the rape. In 1978 — right before sentencing and the prospect of doing time instead of little girls — he fled the country. He had been sentenced to a total of 90 days, by the way, the same amount as Lohan for failing to attend her alcohol rehab sessions.
In France, a nation famous for forgiveness when it comes to talented directors and their fondness for teenage girls (cf. Woody Allen), the general tendency is to harp on the antiquity of the crime: the interesting legal concept being that the passage of years somehow legitimizes rape. The nation’s culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, observed that Polanski was being “thrown to the lions for an old story that doesn’t really make any sense.”
And when the American lions were thwarted of their prey by the Swiss cheeses, the intellectual French writer and activist Bernard-Henri Lévy declared himself “crazy with joy” over the outcome.
Well, the first part of that remark is patently true. The second part — the question of joy over Polanski release — I think you have to be French and unraped to feel it.
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