World's King

It didn't happen at his house. It was at Jack Nicholson's house but he wasn't home. His wife at the time, Anjelica Huston was there. And she defended him saying that girl didn't look her age. And that Roman was a good guy.

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heavy is the head that wears the crown

Seaver

How would anyone act if it was their next door neighbor who pled guilty to drugging and raping a 13 year old girl, then fled the country for 25 years?

Who cares about his fame.

__________________
"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

The_Dunedan

Half of Hollywood and most of Europe, from the things I'm seeing. Pity. I used to like Msr. Sarkozy.

MSD

It's just like the people who get picked up by Nazi hunters these days. You don't commit a serious crime and get away with it just because it happened a long time ago. He was a rapist in 1977, he's a rapist now, and justice was never served because he got away.

levite

I'm not going to say I don't approve of Polanski getting a little justice-- although there appear to have been enough improprieties with his first trial/plea agreement that I am inclined to think a new one is in order-- I have no qualms about putting someone away, whether they happen to be talented and/or famous or not.

However, I do have to question: this seems to be an awful lot of trouble to capture one aged criminal, whose crimes involved the misuse of sex and drugs nearly forty years ago, at a time when half the world was misusing drugs and engaging in sexual improprieties of one kind or another. Maybe if there were some evidence that his apparent taste for underaged girls had survived the 20th Century, or even the Seventies.... I mean, if it were just a matter of the local sherriff snagging some geezer out of the park in Fresno and plopping him on the bus from the local clink to send him down to LA with the rest of the trash, I wouldn't think twice about it. But an organized manhunt involving DOJ and Interpol? How much paperwork does this generate? How many agents are involved? How much bureaucracy? How many of my tax dollars are going toward nabbing one old criminal in Europe, who doesn't appear to have done anything illegal there in thirty-odd years, and hauling his aged ass home to go through all the legal bullshit here, where there is at least some chance he'll end up with a few months in the LA jail plus a zillion hours of community service that he can do from behind a camera?

Sure, what he did was bad. No question. But it was also forty years ago, and there seem to be bigger fish to fry. That's just MHO.

(And, BTW, I think there's a big diff between hunting Nazis, who absolutely did contribute to the deaths of many, and hunting this guy, who may or may not have had non-consensual sex with one girl. Like I said, perfectly willing to believe that he did, and that if he did, it was bad. But there is some element of doubt, and in any case, it can't be compared to mass murder.)

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)

The_Dunedan

No "may or may not" to it. He did it, he copped to it, and then he bugged out because he knew he was in for a taste of his own medicine. As others have noted, this was not his first underage "girlfriend," and the victim's testimony makes clear that this was Rape and Forcible Sodomy, pure and simple, with no room for misinterpretation. She said "no," repeatedly, he kept going (repeatedly), and progressed from cunnilingus to vaginal to anal intercourse, each time over the victim's objections. Pedophiles, pederasts and rapists are notoriously recidivistic; if he did it twice (and he did), that just means those are the only two who either told somebody or were believed. I've never heard of a sexual predator (and that's what we're discussing here; a predator who drugs barely-pubescent girls and then assrapes them) who stopped with two victims and then said to himself "Allright, enough of that, now let's move on to normal sex with adults." Nobody believed it from Erroll Flynn, nobody believed it from any of the dozens of paedophile Priests and other Clergy that've come to light over the years, and I for sure don't believe it from a serial pederast like Roman Polanski.

highthief

Doesn't matter, IMO. The judge is on tape (he was on 20/20 or some such show) and admitted he came down hard on Polanksi not for judicial reasons but to appear popular to the people. Tons of people have been let off on escaping justice when it's many years down the road.

If I could find a bookie to place the bet with, I'd wager he doesn't see the inside of a jail cell for more than a couple of days.

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Si vis pacem parabellum.

The_Dunedan

Of course he won't, he's a wealthy, famous, jet-setting member of the Hollywood elite with significant portions of his cadre, including heads of state, lining up to defend him. The fact that he's a self-confessed rapist will have nothing to do with it.

ratbastid

At this point, NOT punishing him because so much water under the bridge is tantamount to rewarding him for being a successful fugitive. I predict that the rape charges will be more or less dropped (that is what the victim has asked for, anyway, so a judge would be wise to be sensitive to that) but that the flight and avoiding arrest charges will result a the book being thrown at him.

Remember that Al Capone was sent up for tax evasion....

The_Dunedan

Sounds like a plan to me.

wooÐs

Close to my point.

This guy has his own thread here only because he's a celebrity. What about the other trillions of adult children who were molested / raped / abused by an elder? Too late for them to press charges.

SSJTWIZTA

one of my girlfriends good buddies was raped and murdered. she was 14. they found the guy and matched the DNA...he got 3 years in prison, he had the money.

if doing something that horrible only gets you three years if you're wealthy, im sure he'll just get a small slap on the wrist.

__________________
First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the communists and I did not speak out because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for me And there was no one left to speak out for me.
-Pastor Martin Niemoller

Anormalguy

Add my name to the Fry His Ass list.

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guy44

13? No excuses. Send him to PMITA prison.

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Iliftrocks

Well damn, hasn't he suffered enough? I mean he's had to stay out of the US for over 30 years!!!! That's tantamount to being in Hell, right?

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bill hicks - "I don't mean to sound bitter, cold, or cruel, but I am, so that's how it comes out."

Glory's Sun

absolutely disgusting! we have people in prison for longer terms because they had *gasp* drugs on them, yet someone rapes and murders someone and they get 3 years. Placico Burress gets 2 years in prison for carrying a gun in a nightclub and Chris Brown gets probation for beating the shit out of a woman. Man our justice system rocks!

Tully Mars

Why are people still discussing whether or not he gets convicted? He plead guilty which is the same result as being convicted. Only thing left is the sentencing, he didn't like the way the judge was leaning and fled. Now maybe the judge was a publicity whore, don't know. But you drug and rape a 13yrs child you don't get to pick your judge.

I could see a new charge of fugitive flight... but I doubt it. My guess is he's going to spend a few weeks in Swiss custody, work out a deal that allows the LA DA to save face and be returned to the US where he'll a slap on the wrist. Good news for him is Hollywood will welcome him back, probably to a heroes welcome. Who cares if he like to fucks little girls? He makes good movies! Yeah!

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Vice President Starkizzer Fan Club

Glory's Sun

I still say he's going to get time. BBC is reporting that the US has been after him for a while and he was red listed on Interpol. This is too high profile for them to simply broker some weak deal and allow it to go soft. A judge may be sympathetic towards the victim's wishes, but seeing as how Polanski already settled with the victim for an undisclosed amount after a civil trial, there's no reason why a new criminal trial shouldn't be held on both the rape and the fugitive charge.

Some say it should be easy to find a man who is shooting a film..that I agree with, but perhaps there was some underlying red tape that caused it to be a problem.

Historically, the Swiss keep suspects that are on extradition notice in custody, so I think Polanski's lawyers will not be successful in getting him out of Swiss jail. The LA DA has a ton of heat on this case and would more than likely lose an election if this failed.

Even if the judge was considered corrupt in the first trial, the simple fact is that a judge does *not* have to honor a plea bargain set up by defense and prosecution. If a judge rejects the deal, a new plea may be entered or a trial will be held. Polanski knew he was fucked after the first deal was rejected, ran to France because they don't work with the US on extradition and now he needs to face the music. With all due respect to the victim ( previous sexual and drug history is irrelevant in a case like this), she needs to making sure this man pays in more than cash.

roachboy

i agree with tully as to what's likely to happen.
and alot of this follows from the way in which the arrest was done.
i think everyone involved is looking for a way out.
this isn't about "justice" really. this is about saving face.

other folk have mentioned this, but you have to be dreaming if you imagine the american justice system applies the same standards to everyone. by way of law, it imposes the same constraints on everyone---but because of the nature of the process (trial etc) and because of the class system, at the level of outcomes conditioned by those constraints, it's nothing like equitable. never has been. never will be.

this in general.


secondly, insofar as the media-event dimension of this is concerned, it matters a whole lot that this is roman polanski. and it is this fact that sets up the problems which follow, and which will continue to follow, from the way this arrest was made. like i said earlier, given that polanski's owned a house in switzerland for 25 years and was living there the whole of this past summer, an arrest on the d.l. could have been made at any point. you want to treat polanski as a criminal, then arrest him at his house. you want to fuck things up, do what the swiss police did. because it explicitly invokes polanski's work, drags it into play, makes of it an Issue. it makes of the situation an embarrassment. an international embarrassment no less.

think about the reactions from french political quarters. you have the argument out there that puritan america with its distorted sense of "justice" is arresting one of the most important film directors of the past 40 years, who's 78 years old, and doing it in a climate in the context of which the entire notion of statutory rape has been refigured on a cultural level. like it or not, the crime is different--fundamentally different--now than it was in the early 1970s. the reactions here are anachronistic, and cannot be otherwise.

this is not to justify anything, either. it is simply to say that the is in all probability no way polanski could get anything like a fair trial in the united states were this charge at play, and he can afford lawyers who will make sure that this is the central argument, and that the la district attorney's office would loose in court. i have little doubt about this. the flight charge would be the one to maybe stick. but even then, because of the way the arrest happened, and because of how that arrest allowed this whole situation to be framed, that's not gonna happen either.

and so it doesn't matter what you or i think about it. the theater of which this is part is playing by different rules. it's just the way things are.

folk don't like the idea that this is the case, but that doesn't matter: it is the case.
like the wu tang once put it: cash rules everything around me.
we're free like that.
you want to adjust your image of the united states around this, do what Real Americans do: go out and buy something.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

The_Dunedan

I don't care if she was 13, 30, or 130. He drugged her and raped her repeatedly over her stated objections. Orally, vaginally, and anally. In any civilised country, the US and France included, this is rape, pure and simple, and doing it will get you sent to prison for a long time with nobody feeling terribly bad about it...if you're lucky. Leave the age of the victim out of it for a second, and consider the fact that he just plain RAPED her.

Anachronistic reactions my hairy ass.

mixedmedia

is this statutory rape? I don't think it is.

personally, I would feel much differently about it if it were...it just doesn't fit that description.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

Glory's Sun

was he originally charged with statutory rape? if he was then that's a major fuckup by the prosecutor.

this is no where near statutory rape.. it's rape 1.

Walt

If its good enough for Jesus and the Prophet Muhammed, peace be upon Him.....

__________________
Calmer than you are...

roachboy

the conviction was for a single count of having unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. statutory rape.
the reason he fled was that because he was afraid the sentencing would reflect something closer to rape 1.


i was looking this up for the detail and ran across a transcript of the victim's grand jury testimony.
maybe it's interesting.
maybe it's lurid.
either way.

The Smoking Gun: Archive

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

GreyWolf

Technically it is... she was under the legal age (I think someone said it was 16 in California at the time). But you're right, that doesn't matter. The sick bastard violently raped her, over her protests, against her wishes. The inclusion of statutory rape as an included charge would be just to make sure you got him if he managed to raise doubts about the other issues.

What really sickens me right now is the outcry by filmmakers and French politicians and other supporters to let him go because so much time has passed and he has suffered enough already because of the public ridicule and disdain over this. BULLSHIT!! The man is an animal and it is unbelievable they would try to excuse his criminal assault on a child because he is a) old; b) talented; c) a lot of time has passed.

This smacks to me of the Middle Age custom of the Catholic Church selling indulgences to wealthy nobles to excuse sins, often (usually?) in advance. That was wrong. This is wrong. You can't just get away with it because you're better than someone else, especially your victim.

(please note, I use the example of indulgences not as a condemnation of the Catholic Church, but as an example of how easily people are willing to pervert justice on the some utterly indefensible, unconnected logic)

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Glory's Sun

I'm not sure about LA, but here, you can be charged with Rape 1 (forcible, etc) in lieu of Statutory even if the victim is under legal age of consent. The Rape 1 charge carries a class A felony while Statutory carries a class B felony.

I'd like to see him charged with a Class A felony.

mixedmedia

you know, I really don't care what 'he gets'
now that it's happened, I'm just glad that the case is going to come to some sort of conclusion
and i really don't give a hoot at how put out he or anyone else is about how it happened.
when I was really poor and struggling in the late '90s, I would hate it when the power company came and shut my power off on Friday mornings because that meant I would have to hurry and muster up the cash before 2pm or else we would be without power over the weekend.
now, that's not really a just comparison of events, no, but it illustrates the ways in which 'regular folks' have to deal with the fucked up ways shit goes down sometimes and they're ain't nobody gonna start petitions or cry for your just treatment in public about it.
the man has had a beautiful and properous life but he did this thing. and sometimes you can't just walk away. that's life.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

World's King

__________________
heavy is the head that wears the crown

roachboy

gucci: double jeopardy. it's out of the question.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Glory's Sun

oh I know. just wishful thinking.

Strange Famous

A sentence that see's him facing at least 10 years of grey days would be appropriate

Being talented does not excuse such a revoting criminal act. Any nation which has sheltered this sex offender from justice should be ashamed.

__________________
"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,
for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing
hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain
without being uncovered."

The Gospel of Thomas

gdr2004

What's the deciding factor for me is that t was wrong for him to flee, regardless of how guilty he was.

Seaver

Roach I'm honestly shocked by your lack of interest in this.

You pointed out there was not a trial in which the average person would enjoy because of his wealth/fame. He drugged and raped a girl against her wishes, and he only got sex with a minor. That's like someone shooting a guy in the face and getting off with disturbing the peace.

He got this because of his wealth and fame... NOTHING ELSE. You should be up in arms over the binary legal system this is showing, but instead you're in his corner.

__________________
"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

pig

I've been thinking about this for a while since the news hit that he'd been arrested, and I think the importance that the particular arrest of this particular child rapist has to do with factors that I've not seen discussed yet in this thread, or in any other discussion of it for that matter. I think the ultimate problem for Mr. Polanski, and the reason that it has so much perceived spotlight is largely the fault of Mr. Polanski himself. I've not read the original court documents in detail, but from what I can gather he admitted that he had sex with the 13 year old girl, was given a plea bargain by the DA, which he then feared would not be honored by the judge in the case. He was released and allowed to travel to Europe, and then refused to return to the sentencing. If this is correct, then it seems to me that the people involved in the case must have had a reasonable expectation that he might not return, but that's not the central point, in my eyes. Given the nature of the crime, and the fact that his pregnant wife had been brutally slain by Charles Manson's cohorts, I would imagine that there was a certain amount of melodrama associated with the original case which led to the strange way that it played out. 44 year old successful Hollywood darling, at Jack Nicholson's house, who apparently raped a 13 year old girl who was known to have engaged in some previous high-risk behavior. Media focus on the case, careers of the judge and DA in question...and Polanski slipped away.

There are no doubt countless other pedofiles, pedarasts, rapists, muderers..etc...who have skipped town and made it to countries without strong extradition policies with the U.S. I think if Polanski had moved to France, or even Switzerland...and kept a low profile, this wouldn't be happening right now. He might show up on a "Where are they now?" program every so often, and be the subject of cultural myth. However, Polanski decided to continue keeping himself in the limelight. He continued to make movies, and public appearances. He kept himself relevant, and he kept the fact that he'd alluded the American court system and had flown out country after a controversial case relevant.

Therefore, I think that his behavior could easily be interpreted as flaunting his freedom from American justice, and this behavior gives a strong sense of entitlement and being above the law. It's not so much the particulars of this case, but what Polanski came to represent. After so much public attention on his work, and the awards for "The Pianist" which he famously chose not to receive in person, I think it was inevitable that the U.S. justice system would make it a point to pick him up. And apparently they did. There is an apparent lack of real remorse, and a sense conveyed that he believes himself to be outside the jurisdiction of justice for his crime...and I think this is what is really fueling the desire to bring him back. The efforts to keep him out of U.S. jurisdiction because he's a famous and successful entertainment icon only make this perception worse. It seems to say that he should be less accountable for his crimes because he's done some nice film work, and this notion above all else is what may end up bringing him down. If he'd just kept a low profile in France, I doubt any of us would be reading about this in the news.

I can't really say I have a problem with that. If you get away with it, don't throw it in people's faces. They will come to resent you.

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roachboy

seaver--i actually am interested in this, but as a Problem created by the swiss police that is big enough that i wouldn't be surprised to see what i outline above happening.
if i wasn't interested in the situation, i'd probably be calling for him to simply be put away.
you know.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

james t kirk

I heard a very interesting comparison today....

Say Polanski was a Catholic priest instead of a famous movie Director.

Would that change things for those who are protesting his capture?

If you can't say you'd let the priest off the hook (Woody Allen, Martin Scorcesse, Whoopi Goldberg), then how is it that you can find it in you to let Polanski off the hook?

BTW, here's what Whoopi had to say.




It wasn't "rape - rape"

I guess that's worse than just rape. But not as bad as rape-rape-rape.

Charlatan

I don't see Whoopi as an apologist at all. I think she, like many, just doesn't see this issue in stark black and white. There are shades of grey in most things. And those shades, in this case, are further muddied by time. As usual, we get passionate (almost to the point of getting out the mad villager torches and pitchforks) with out taking a pause. My instinct in these sorts of things is to back off and try to be as dispassionate as possible. I never want to find myself at the heart of mob... or mob-think.

__________________
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- Old Man Luedecke

james t kirk

Yeah, but.....

In some things in life, there are lines which is black on one side and white on the other. In this case, it's a pretty easy to define line. Age. It's easily quantified.

It is illegal to have sex with a person under the age of 16, or 14, or 18. (Especially if you're a 44 year old man. It might be shades of grey if he was 16 and she was 13, but 44 and 13 - that's black and white.)

I'm not one clamouring for Polanski to be castrated, or fried, however, he needs to face the music on this one.

I read yesterday that even the French have backed off calling for his release. Now that's interesting.

French government drops support for Polanski - Yahoo! News

roachboy

if the actual issue at play in this thread keeps moving off what it actually is--a flight from justice---and back onto the action for which polanski was already convicted, then it's pretty clear that there's not much black-and-white about the situation, isn't it?

personally, i dont doubt that what happened happened, and dont doubt that the conviction was correct in that plea-bargain kinda way--and i also dont doubt that had the same thing happened in 2009, it would have been defined differently. but the fact is, like it or not, it didn't happen in 2009 and the issue now is not really what people in 2009 think of what happened in 1972, but rather that he was arrested in a fucked-up manner for a flight from justice warrant. *that's* the center of this empirically.

the other center is the complexity of the situation created by the arrest itself. what i suspect you're seeing from sarkosy's administration follows from not inconsiderable pressure from the united states to back down. because unless the resistance to this calms, anything that happens---anything at all, no matter which way things turn out---will be a debacle.

i find all of this surreal.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

The_Dunedan

Whoopi Goldberg is a frikkin' IDIOT. "It wasn't RAPE-rape..."

OF COURSE IT WAS, YOU SMEG-HEAD!

Sometimes an issue either IS black or IS white, PERIOD. You can't be "half pregnant" or "half raped."

Edited: I mistakenly compared Ms. Goldberg to a particularly lovely and useful portion of the feminine anatomy, one of which I'm quite fond. My apologies. I did not mean to so crudely insult the vaginas of the world.