What I find most problematic about the people who are publicly rushing to condemn filmmaker Roman Polanski – who was arrested last week in Switzerland on an outstanding U.S. warrant dating back 30 years, when Polanski fled the States to avoid sentencing after pleading guilty to having unlawful sex with a minor – is how many of them are writers.
Polanski pleaded guilty to engaging in unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl in the hot tub at Jack Nicholson’s California home in 1977. Although he had entered a plea to a reduced charge in the hopes of receiving a lighter sentence, he fled the country because he had reason to believe that the judge in the case, now deceased, wanted to make a name for himself by throwing the book at the filmmaker. He has not entered the States or Britain since.
Now, let’s get this out of the way right up front: unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old is wrong. Polanski, who admitted to this act (although he denies that he knew she was 13 at the time), is criminally, if not morally culpable. Having said that, the overheated rhetoric of Kate Harding’s recent Salon article is somewhat suspect. “Roman Polanski raped a child,” Harding screeches in peals of full-blown righteous indignation. Well, no, he didn’t. Although his victim (and that is the appropriate word to describe her) was underage, she was not a child. Childhood and adolescence are not the same thing.
Polanski has said that he didn’t know that his victim was 13. Although it will likely win me no friends, I’m inclined to believe him. It is doubtless anathema to admit to it, but there are many 13-year-olds wandering the halls of any given city high school who could easily pass for 18 or older. And in terms of sensibility, some young teens are as calculating and as morally unkempt as many adults. Polanski’s victim repeatedly told him to stop his sexual advances; it’s this fact, not the girl’s age, that is most damning to the filmmaker. It is not possible to take the moral high ground when you admit to plying someone with drugs and alcohol then committing acts of unlawful sexual intercourse, regardless of the age of your victim. However, it should be reiterated: Polanski’s victim was not a child.
The foregoing is in no way meant as a defence of the filmmaker’s actions. However, his impulse to flee the country following a trial that may have involved judicial and prosecutorial misconduct seems like the understandably panicked reaction of a man whose experience with the forces of state authority has not been stellar. Polanski’s mother died in a Nazi death camp and his father was a Holocaust survivor. Polanski himself spent much of his childhood in the Krakow ghetto in Poland, a country from which he later emigrated to escape the communist government. His wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson family, a crime for which he was initially suspected.
Again, none of this exculpates Polanski’s guilt for the crime of rape. However, when writers rush to condemn the man – in the most overblown and indignant prose imaginable – it appears from where I sit to amount to a failure of one of the artist’s most significant attributes: empathy. Not forgiveness, not acceptance of another’s actions, but empathetic understanding. Polanski’s crime – and all its attendant issues of patriarchy, entitlement, and the like – is clearly a flashpoint for a great deal of emotion. But it is incumbent upon writers especially to take a step back from their emotional reactions to a situation and try to come to grips with the personages involved, in all their muddiness and humanity. Perhaps then, they would be able to see Polanski for what he is: a flawed, scarred, imperfect human being. A man who committed an unquestionably bad act. But the writer’s impulse, rather than jumping on a condemnatory emotional bandwagon, should be an attempt to understand that bad act. If artists abdicate this responsibility, who will be left to take it up?
(From That Shakespearean Rag)
8 Comments
You are wrong Polanski is a CHILD rapist! Child - 1: a person between birth and full growth; a boy or girl 2: a person who has not attained maturity or the age of legal majority. Legal Definition - a person below an age specified by law : INFANT, MINOR child under 16 years of age> — compare ADULT DL
Posted by DL on October 1, 2009
"A a flawed, scarred, imperfect human being?" Try "a rapist." Most people are flawed, scarred, and imperfect - but that doesn't mean they rape. I don't care about what's happened in Polanski's past. Nothing justifies rape, and that's all there is to understanding that act. It doesn't matter that the victim was an adolescent and not a child. Why even bother to make that distinction? Sure, to quiet everyone saying "child rapist," but isn't "rapist" just as bad? What people call him doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that he didn't know how old she was. What matters is that HE RAPED HER. That she said no. That she was drugged and still asked him several times to stop. Rape is a violent act of power and no one who can inflict that kind of shame, fear, and injury on someone gets no empathy from me, nor should they from anyone else.
Posted by Emma Woolley on October 1, 2009
You're making something of a strawman out of the Salon piece. I have no problem believing that the focus-on-the-family camp has taken their characteristically shrill "think of the children" angle, but Harding is not one of those writers. In my reading of the Salon piece, she is clearly invoking "rape" as the operative word -- not "child." The most "overheated" of her prose refers not to the victim's age but to the gruesome blow-by-blow details of the assault itself. (I quote: "Roman Polanski instructed her to get into a jacuzzi naked, refused to take her home when she begged to go, began kissing her even though she said no and asked him to stop; performed cunnilingus on her as she said no and asked him to stop; put his penis in her vagina as she said no and asked him to stop; asked if he could penetrate her anally, to which she replied, "No," then went ahead and did it anyway, until he had an orgasm. . . Can we take a moment to think about all that, and about the fact that Polanski pled guilty to unlawful sex with a minor, before we start talking about what a victim he is?") More important, for your purposes, is that splitting semantic hairs -- such as whether someone with pubic hair can be rightly referred to as child -- isn't much of a hook to hang your hat on if what you're trying to do is cultivate empathy for a man who may not have had much concept of female age but who nonetheless committed rape. And, as to the issue of writerly empathy, I think that instead of broadly vilifying as overblown the variegated and often nuanced “condemnations” that have been published this past week, you should demonstrate some good-faith empathy of your own: assume the authors have taken into full, careful consideration all the legitimate mitigating factors -- of which, as you rightly point out, there are many – and have emerged from their due consideration with anger intact. It’s also possible that a journalist’s taking a default stance of benefit-of-the-doubt-style empathy with respect to Polanski is being professionally irresponsible. Consider our legal system as an analogue: in most civil proceedings, the burden of proof lies with the complainant; but certain claims, such as libel, are thought by jurists to be so serious as to merit shifting the burden of proof to the defendant. The court asks, in effect, to be given a good reason not to condemn the defendant. To Polanski, journalists are likewise saying, “Give us a good reason, beyond what is already a matter of 30-year-old public record, not to condemn you. And go through the proper channels; the judge who wanting to use your name to make his has died.” When the issue at hand is a sex assault as vile as what Harding recounts, writers and journalists surely have such a prerogative.
Posted by Matt LaForge on October 1, 2009
I think the fact that writers are rushing to condemn him is more a reaction to the absurd level of support he's received from certain politicians and filmmakers. Also, "I didn't know she was 13" is a pretty weak excuse. And even if it were a good excuse, photos of the girl from the time of the incident seem to indicate that indeed, she looked 13. And as you point out, regardless of age, Polanski plied her with drugs and booze, then had sex with her even as she asked him to stop. Legally, this is rape. It's rape if she's 13, and it's rape if she's 45. Polanski did something wrong. He even admitted it. Then he ran away. He is not a persecuted artist. He is a man who made a terrible mistake, and I don't have any problem with him being held morally and legally culpable.
Posted by Matthew on October 1, 2009
Great article. It was refreshing to read something more objective and sympathetic in regards to this entire Polanski case. My beef with all this is that people haven't had an issue with this scandal in the last 30 years and now because of the arrest, everyone is ready to send this man to hell. Let him be. He's done a very bad thing, and he has never denied it and he's paid for it enough, IMO. As far as anyonce can tell, he's led a model life since then. I myself have two teenagers and wondered about how I would react if I was the victim's parent. But I do know that I would not be pimping off my daughter to the hollywood party elite of the 70's which is apparently what happened in this case. Also, this 13 year-old victim was having sexual relations with her boyfried prior to the rape which brings me to what Mr. Beattie said in the paragraph about over-sexualized teens. This is not a black&white case of rape. But regardless of this, it was nonconsensual sex and deservingly so Polanski deserved to get charged at the time. However, with the combination of the legal complications (.ie prosecutor urging the judge to renege a deal for a harsher sentence), and the fact that his victim has since forgiven him and doesn't want to get caught up on this again after 30 years, I think the courts should just let this be. There are bigger criminals to worry about than a 74-year old movie director.
Posted by Jenn F on October 1, 2009
Yeah cut him some slack. I mean sure Nero let Rome burn, but the guy played a mean fiddle.
Posted by John on October 2, 2009
quoted from The Atlantic Wire: The arrest is absurd because: Generally, two reasons for imposing penalties on criminals are cited. The first is vengeance, usually called "punishment." The closest thing to a sound argument for vengeance is that it deters victims and their relatives from taking it themselves by inflicting harm on the perpetrator. Since the victim in this case forgives him and says she would be harmed by a trial, that seems to eliminate that. The other reason is deterrence, both to discourage repeat offenses and to deter others. Since Polanski at 76 seems unlikely to do it again, and no outburst of molestation is likely to follow his release, that settles that.
Posted by Ryan on October 8, 2009
Not sure why my comment on this story was erased, but I just want to point out again that "having sex" and "rape" are different things, and Polanski clearly engaged in the latter. Not just statutory rape, but full-blown no-consent-given rape, which is not ok no matter the age of child/adolescent/adult involved.
Posted by jessica on October 18, 2009