Pour ceux qui lisent l'anglais - l'"Amérique que nous aimons", comme disait l'autre touriste :
Citation:
Everybody's least favorite character is French/Polish film director Roman Polanski. Except for a few Hollywood fools and European intellectuals who express the perverse belief that art excuses all crimes, hardly anybody would be upset to see Polanski go to prison. (In polls, ordinary Poles and Frenchmen reject the art alibi by large majorities.) As one who thinks his film "Chinatown" a masterpiece, I don't much care what happens to him.
Polanski's a one-dimensional villain to almost everybody except his 1977 victim, now a 45-year-old mother of three who's forgiven him. She thinks even the seven weeks he served undergoing psychiatric evaluation were excessive. Samantha Geimer has long argued that charges should be dropped.
Should her wishes be honored? Not necessarily. However, it also shouldn't be forbidden to wonder why she thinks that way. Wasn't her life irretrievably ruined by the famous director's crime? Evidently, Geimer doesn't think so.
It's also important to call things by their right names. Yes, it's illegal for an adult man to have sex with a 13-year-old girl; the slang term is "jailbait." (Remember Louisiana rock 'n' roller Jerry Lee Lewis and his 13-year-old wife being expelled from England?) But that doesn't make Polanski a "pedophile," i.e. a deeply disturbed person obsessed with pre-pubescent children. If I had my way, there'd be no need for a "Megan's Law" tracking paroled pedophiles, because there wouldn't be any parole. Ever.
Anyway, here's what the now-deceased judge who accepted Polanski's guilty plea said at the hearing: "The probation report discloses that although just short of her 14th birthday at the time of the offense, the (victim) was a well-developed young girl who looked older than her years; and regrettably not unschooled in sexual matters. She has a 17-year-old boyfriend, with whom she had sexual intercourse at least twice prior to the offense involved. The probation report further reveals that the (victim) was not unfamiliar with the drug Quaalude, she having experimented with it as early as her 10th or 11th year."
The child also apparently had the Stage Mother from Hell, a film industry tradition. In short, there may have been excellent reasons why both sides wanted to avoid a highly publicized Hollywood trial, and no reason to treat the grand jury testimony of a 14-year-old girl pressed by her mother and the prosecutor as holy writ. She may have interpreted Polanski's pleading guilty to a reduced charge as a kindness.
That said, Polanski's 1979 interview with novelist Martin Amis ought to earn him a special place in hell, if not a California penitentiary. "If I had killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see?" he said. "But ... judges want to (bleep) young girls. Juries want to (bleep) young girls. Everyone wants to (bleep) young girls!"
Actually, no they don't. But
a culture that tolerates beauty pageants for heavily made-up little girls, promotes teen bombshells like Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus and a million "Barely Legal" porn films ought to consider where Polanski got the idea. The law may demand that a fleeing felon be brought to justice, but we Americans should probably be a bit less smug about it.
