> No, not statutory rape. Rape rape.
I found this story so intriguing I just watched the (sympathetic to Polanski) HBO documentary about it. You can watch it streaming on Netflix. It's worth seeing.
But even before I saw the movie there was something about the tone of the outraged-by-Polanski side I found disturbing. Much of it (and I'm not talking about you here Michael) seems like a hysterical outpouring of puritanical zeal. In my opinion, screaming Rape! Raping! Rapist! every time someone comes to Polanski's defense, as some of the articles posted here do, exhibits a lynch-mob mentality; it's designed to shut down reasoning.
Polanski's actions might well meet the legal definition of rape (although the actual rape charge was dropped), but I think one would have to admit it's a very unusual kind of rape in which the perpetrator does not intend to frighten or harm the victim - and that is what the victim said: "I do not believe that it was Mr. Polanski's intention to frighten me or cause me harm." It's also an unusual rape case when the 13-year-old victim and her mother plead with the court not to sentence the perpetrator to jail, as the mother and daughter did at the time of the original legal proceedings, in 1977, when the crime was still fresh in everyone's minds.
And when I say that, that's all I mean to say - that if it was a case of rape, it was a highly unusual one, and screaming This Man Is A Rapist represents a form of guilt by association, in which Polanski is assimilated to the perpetrators of brutal and sadistic crimes, which is a type of tactic that comes all the more effortlessly to Americans when the subject is a sensualist with an accent, an artist who had repeatedly taken the hazard of exposing the more dubious and unsavory elements of his own psyche in his movies.
The guy did not do hard jail time - in accordance with the victim's wishes - but he did serve a month and a half in state prison for psychiatric evaluation, he was publicly humiliated, he permanently lost his freedom to live in his adopted country where he'd made his career, and he was forced to spend a year of his life and millions in legal bills on this case. The latest episode seems to have been driven by the dumbest, most craven and vulgar publicity-seeking on the part of the prosecutors. If anyone cared about my opinion I think I'd sign one of those petitions too.
SA