Time may heal but it doesn't excuse

When did raping a child become excusable?

The furor and outrage over Roman Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland on the weekend has left me virtually speechless. This is not a man who is falsely accused – he in fact pleaded guilty all those years ago and then was worried his plea agreement wouldn’t be respected so he did what people of means often do, he fled.

He was ever so crafty. Lived in France and ironically, Switzerland. He made movies all over the world except in those countries likely to extradite him to the United States and won an Oscar or two in the process.

That he is a brilliant filmmaker is not in doubt.

But that he is a rapist is also not disputed.

According to the unsealed Grand Jury testimony and summarized nicely on The Smoking Gun web site, Polanski got his victim drunk and he drugged her. And then he raped her.

Two weeks after Polanski plied her with Champagne and a Quaalude, Samantha Gailey appeared before an L.A. grand jury and recalled Polanski's predatory behavior in a Mulholland Canyon home owned by Jack Nicholson.

The teenager's troubling--and contemporaneous--account of her abuse at Polanski's hands begins with her posing twice for topless photos that the director said were for French Vogue. The girl then told prosecutors how Polanski directed her to, "Take off your underwear" and enter the Jacuzzi, where he photographed her naked. Soon, the director, who was then 43, joined her in the hot tub. He also wasn't wearing any clothes and, according to Gailey's testimony, wrapped his hands around the child's waist.

The girl testified that she left the Jacuzzi and entered a bedroom in Nicholson's home, where Polanski sat down beside her and kissed the teen, despite her demands that he "keep away." According to Gailey, Polanski then performed a sex act on her and later "started to have intercourse with me." At one point, according to Gailey's testimony, Polanski asked the 13-year-old if she was "on the pill," and "When did you last have your period?" Polanski then asked her, Gailey recalled, "Would you want me to go in through your back?" before he "put his penis in my butt." Asked why she did not more forcefully resist Polanski, the teenager told Deputy D.A. Roger Gunson, "Because I was afraid of him."

She was 13 years old. She was a child at the time. And she said no.

We have a justice system not just to seek justice for the victim but seek justice for society. A crime like Polanski’s, and make no mistake, it is a crime and a violent one at that, damages our societal fabric and it must be punished.

His victim may have forgiven him and may wish for the whole thing to disappear – for a variety of reasons – but none of that changes what he did. He raped a child. And all the Oscars, lifetime achievement awards and years ticking by won’t alter that fact.
Polanski may be genuinely sorry. He may regret to the very depth of his soul what he did but that alone does not excuse him from facing punishment.

Why is he deserving of different treatment? He may be a brilliant man but that actually doesn’t make him all that different from many other convicted rapists. If he were a steel worker, or a bureaucrat or a police officer or a doctor who committed the same crime all those years ago and fled justice, would Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Presidents and actors be calling for us all just to move along?

And what kind of message are we sending to other victims of sexual violence when we excuse him so easily?