In March 1977, filmmaker Roman Polanski lured a 13-year-old girl to the home of actor Jack Nicholson on the pretext of a photo shoot that might advance her career. The girl would later describe for a grand jury how she was drugged and plied with alcohol and then repeatedly sexually violated despite her crying and repeated protestations. In the course of raping her, Polanski even asked if she was on birth control.
Despite strong evidence and a credible witness against him, Polanski was allowed to plead down from the crimes of drug-induced rape and lewd acts upon a child under 14 to mere “unlawful sexual intercourse.” Still, he fled to France just hours before his sentence was to be handed down and has remained a fugitive ever since.
There is still a chance that he will finally face justice. Poland’s justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, has promised to appeal an adverse lower court ruling preventing Polanski’s extradition to the United States.
Most people would see this as welcome. But the New York Times sees it differently, as not the story of a heinous crime by a child predator, but as about the erosion of that nation’s judicial independence.
The Times spends four paragraphs framing Polanski’s current problem as the result of an October election sweep by a right-leaning Polish political party. There is much to cause concern about the government of Poland, but the possibility that Polanski might finally be punished for his crime is not one of them.
The impression given by the Times is that child rapists are bad and all, but this one extremely popular with America’s entertainment elites, so we must make allowances. Polanski’s case is covered as though he were Captain Georg von Trapp from “The Sound of Music,” heroically overcoming the injustice of an authoritarian state in order to keep his freedom and integrity.
This is not the first instance of America’s infotainment-industrial complex attempting to cultivate sympathy for this monster, or covering up for others like him. As recently as 2009, Whoopi Goldberg, a self-described feminist, explained for the audience of “The View” that Polanski’s rape of a 13-year-old girl “wasn’t a rape-rape.”
Many former child actors have spoken up in recent years, describing Hollywood as a depraved hotbed of organized child sex abuse where publicly respected figures cover up a severe problem and protect abusers.
Former child actor Elijah Wood spoke out on the topic. Before him, Corey Feldman of “Goonies” fame claimed to have been plied with drugs and abused by older men, all the while reassured by trusted adults in Hollywood that this was normal in the industry and he should go along. He even named his abusers to the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s department in 1993, but they weren’t interested in pursuing the case. He also named fellow actor Corey Haim as an abuse victim, offering a possible explanation for Haim’s drug abuse and premature death.
Not all victims are children. How many Bill Cosbys are out there waiting to be found and sued?
Polanski is the rare case in which there was a conviction. That he elicits sympathy is a sign of cultural rot, as is the fact that a serious newspaper would print help make him more sympathetic. America’s news-gathering and entertainment industries have an unhealthy symbiotic relationship, based in part on the shared medium of television. (How many puff news pieces are produced to promote programming and movies owned by the same media conglomerate?) Trashy celebrity news draws clicks and sells papers. As Polanski’s case demonstrates, celebrity obsession is a poisonous influence on American culture.
It’s interesting how when sex scandals and cover-ups occur in institutions that new media dislike, such as the Roman Catholic Church, they are covered and investigated appropriately and become the stuff of award-winning movies. But when they are prepetrated in institutions the media reveres, there is no investigation, and coverage is tainted by sympathy for criminals and snooty disregard for victims.
No one should be above the law. We hope Poland does the right thing where other European states balked. Polanski, now-82, is a fugitive criminal and deserves a long a stretch of hospitality from the people of California.
