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About "Roman Polanski ":

Roman Polanski is considered one of the greatest living directors today with a long and varied career. He directed Rosemary’s Baby, which was made in the late 1960s. In the 1970s his film noir Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson, is routinely on top lists for the greatest motion pictures of all time. In 2002 his film The Pianist won the prestigious Palme D’Or at the Cannes (given to him by head of the jury David Lynch). Polanski also won the Best Director Oscar for that film. Few directors have achieved such popular and critical acclaim over such a long time period.

However, there is a reason Polanski did not produce much of consequence in the 1980s and 1990s. For a time Polanski’s reputation was damaged because of his flight from America due to a statutory rape charge in 1979. This doesn’t seem so bad. That bad little Roman Polanski… he had sex with an underage girl. It’s normal for an older man and a younger woman to be together, right? Wrong.

First of all, Polanski had sex with a thirteen year old girl. Secondly, it was not consensual. Thirdly, he gave her drugs and booze which caused her to pass out (which is when the non-consensual sex happened). Fourthly he led her to Jack Nicholson’s under false pretenses, saying he was going to be taking photographs of her for French Vogue but then coaxing her into removing her top and photographing her topless.

Needless to say, Polanski was charged with rape and a lot more than that, but the girl’s family allowed him to plead guilty to only the lesser charge of statutory rape in an effort to spare their daughter the public exposure that a trial would thrust upon her.  Whoops, bad metaphor.

So Polanski takes this gift of having his likely 20+ year prison sentence reduced to 1-2 years maximum and decides to flee the country instead (to France, which does not extradite its own citizens). So, no, I do not think that Polanski deserves the benefit of the doubt on this one. While even the victim has spoken in favor of forgiving Polanski his trespasses, being a Great Director does not give you a free child raping pass (as if such a thing existed)!

Granted, Polanski has gone through a lot in his life, more than most will ever have to bear.  One of the reasons The Pianist was so successful was because it was a look back at Polanski’s own flight from the horrors of Holocaust when he was a young boy. Later he was married to Sharon Tate who was murdered by Charles Manson and his followers (who believed that a record executive who slighted Manson’s own musical recordings still lived in Polanski’s house). Not only was his wife murdered, she was eight months pregnant with his child when he was murdered. Needless to say, I cannot imagine going through these things.

Yet, despite my lack of experience in these matters, nothing one has experienced excuses what Polanski did. And it wasn’t just what he did; it was his unwillingness to pay his significantly reduced debt to society that is the most irksome quality of the whole affair. It is the arrogance of "the artist" at its worst.

Can one separate an artist’s sins from their work? With time, perhaps you can. For now you can at least be informed before you watch Chinatown again and think “Polanski raped that girl at Jack Nicholson’s house”.

ERF