Waaaaaaaambulance Caller of the Week

Roman Polanski.

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Self-Parody is Too Mild a Term

Shorter Verbatim Bernard Henri-Levy: "I am mostly thinking about him: Roman Polanski, who I don't know, but whose fate has moved me so much. Nothing will repair the days he has spent in prison. Nothing will erase the immense, unbelievable injustice he has been subjected to."

I suppose it should go without saying that this alleged Major Intellectual cannot be bothered to advance an argument defending the proposition that apprehending someone who raped a 13-year-old and then fled the jurisdiction to evade his punishment constitutes an "immense, unbelievable injustice." (This kind of rhetoric isn't just silly, it's insulting to actual victims of immense injustices. At this rate, BHL would need about 70 adjectives to describe the Cameron Todd Willingham case.) To the extent that one can infer an argument from the surrounding text, the mentions of his wife and family seem to imply a retread of Robert Harris's apparent argument that if you have a spouse and kids you should get one retrospective child rape for free. I once again take this to be self-refuting...

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Saletan and Polanski

Though alerted by both emailers and commenters about this, I was hoping to avoid it. But then, via Patterico (who deals with it well enough), I saw the followup, and...they pull me back in. First, let's consider this, when Saletan responds to commenters who noted the fact that he completely ignored the fact that the sex in the Polanski case doesn't seem to have been even nominally consensual:

Many of you, in response, called attention to the victim's grand jury testimony, which alleges that Polanski gave her a Quaalude and that he ignored her instructions to stop. Those allegations are important pieces of evidence. Not decisive—we don't convict people in this country based on grand jury testimony from one party—but important. So are other parts of her testimony, which detail apparently voluntary acts of compliance, such as taking off her underwear.

Even leaving aside the fact that in context at best removing her underwear represented consent to nude photography rather than sexual intercourse, this really isn't a very complicated question either legally or morally. If she repeatedly said "no" to having sex with Polanski subsequent to removing her underwear, he was obligated to stop, and if he didn't it's rape. Period. If her testimony is accurate, there can be no question that Polanski was guilty of sexual assault irrespective of the victim's age.

Then there's this:

The same goes for laws about sexual abuse. If you have the goods to convict a man of rape, prosecute him for rape. Don't invite him to plead guilty to sex with a teenager. That kind of plea deal, coupled with a stiff jail sentence, just furthers the conflation of sexual assault defined by force with sexual assault defined by age.

A couple points:

• Polanski, given the credible evidence that he was guilty of sexual assault, did not receive anything remotely resembling a stiff sentence. Even had the judge set aside the informal agreement, he did not seem at risk for serving anything more than 90 days.
• It is true that California made a plea agreement to a lesser offense. Although the sentence was far too lenient, given the context (no rape shield law, and a not-coincidentally reluctant-to-testify victim) I'm not inclined to second-guess the decision without knowing more, and pleading to lesser offenses that the defendant concedes to is banal. But since nobody is saying that Polanski should be re-tried, that's not the issue. Rather, what's going on is that Polanski's apologists are arguing that the director should be given special treatment. If a normal person skipped out on a plea agreement, nobody would find his arrest unusual or claim that his going to jail was unjust. Surely, the victim's credible testimony under oath that she was sexually assaulted is relevant to determining whether Polanski should not have to face consequences that virtually anyone else in his position would have to, even if the state of California is formally obligated to treat him as if he was guilty only of statutory rape.
  

Update (Paul): Like Scott I also hate to get pulled back into this, but it's appalling that Saletan treats statutory rape in this context as significantly different from forcible rape. Obviously statuory rape creates difficult line-drawing problems, but it's hard to believe that many people find the idea of a 45-year-old man having sex with a 13-year-old girl to be anywhere near such lines. Even leaving aside the fact that the victim was intoxicated, Saletan's reference to the victim as a "teenager" obscures this. Would he be making the same argument if she had been 12? 12 is a lot closer to 13 for these purposes than 13 is to 17 or 16, and not just mathematically speaking.

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The last word

He only raped one little girl.

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Blame it on the 70s

This NYT story argues that the American legal system and the culture in general have become far less lenient toward adults having sex with minors since the wild and crazy 1970s. While doing so it softpedals Roman Polanski's crimes, waiting until the 13th graph to mention that the girl he raped testified the rape was forcible, and failing to mention at all that Polanski now faces prison time for fleeing from justice for 30 years, in addition to the crime to which he pleaded guilty.

Worse yet, it frames Polanski's offenses by comparing them to the fictional romance in Woody Allen's film Manhattan, which involved a consensual relationship between a nearly 18-year-old character and Allen's middle aged alter ego. Whatever legal and moral objections might be raised to such a relationship (and they would be considerable if, for example, the Allen character was in a position of trust or authority in regard to the Mariel Hemingway character -- I saw the film 30 years ago and don't remember if this was the case), it nevertheless involves a radically different situation than that in Polanski's real-life rape drama.

The story also contains this almost unbelievably fatuous quote from Polanski's probation report:

Possibly not since Renaissance Italy has there been such a gathering of creative minds in one locale as there has been in Los Angeles County during the past half century. While enriching the community with their presence, they have brought with them the manners and mores of their native lands which in rare instances have been at variance with those of their adoptive land.

In this context it might be worth mentioning that the late 70s did feature high profile films such as Taxi Driver and Pretty Baby, in which 13 and 12 year old girl characters starred as glamorized and disturbingly sexualized siren/prostitutes (Indeed the sexualization of Brooke Shields in general was a creepy motif of the times). But life doesn't get to imitate art without criminal consequences, even in Hollywood.

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Proudly Joining Woody Allen

Guy whose primary work in film involved casting soft-porn flicks calls rape of 13-year-old "a little thing" in rising to the defense of Roman Polanski. Further commentary is presumably rendered superfluous.

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Anne Applebaum, You've Got To Be Putting Me On

In today's edition, Anne Applebaum attempts to further explain the many complexities that make it "outrageous" that someone who raped a 13-year-old and fled the authorities after pleading guilty was arrested. Apparently, the slut had it coming because her mother permitted her to be alone in the same room with Polanski:

What apalled [sic] me about that story was the mother’s reaction, which should have been “I am coming to get you right now.” There is more than one adult who bears responsibility here, which is part of what makes the story so far from straightforward.

First of all, I am (to put it mildly) skeptical of the idea that any mother who doesn't treat anyone who may interact with her daughter -- including in a professional setting! -- as a child molester is irresponsible. This is Grade A, or "Tim McCarver" level, second-guessing. But even if we assume that the victim's mother should have had the wisdom that Applebaum so easily acquired decades after the fact knowing what happened, it should be obvious that from Polanski's perspective this doesn't provide the slightest mitigation or "complexity" whatsoever. Whether or not her mother acted wisely, the choice to drug and rape an adolescent* was Polanski's alone, and he alone shares the moral and legal responsibility. It's frankly amazing that it's necessary to explain this to anyone, let alone a well-compensated national pundit.

And then, there's this:

Yes, there is “evidence” that Polanski did not know the girls age – or that he was told but did not believe it: He has told people since that, anyway. Pictures of her from the time show a girl who could be anywhere from 12-25.

Given this standard -- in which even actually being informed of a victim's age doesn't constitute evidence -- I don't see any reason to keep statutory rape laws on the books at all. But it's worse: this is the young woman that Applebaum says could be 25. I don't think further elaboration is necessary.

I'm not even sure what to say about someone who continues to invent new erroneous "facts" and transparently specious arguments to defend someone who rapes a 13 year-old, but I think Brad DeLong's argument that "there is grave moral fault attached to everybody who pays the Washington Post company a cent for any purpose whatsoever" is a good start.

*Applebaum considers this characterization erroneous, but needless to say doesn't explain which isn't true. Since both elements were admitted by Polanski in his plea agreement, I'm sticking with them...

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Talent Does Not Mean Good Political Thought

In case the Polanski itself doesn't convince you that good politics/morals and major artistic talent have much to do with each other, I note that while people like Martin Scorsese, Ethan Coen and (natch) Woody Allen are on the wrong side of the issue, the likes of Luc Besson and Jewel haven't decided to become ad hoc rape apologists. Although it's nice to see cases where major artistic talent and intelligent moral and political analysis go together, it wouldn't be wise to expect it.

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QOTD

Greenwald, on Fred Hiatt criticizing "French" and "Hollywood" defenses of Polanski while ignoring the defenses of Polanski on his own op-ed page:

But the last thing that ought to be surprising is to find defenses of morally depraved acts on the Op-Ed page of the Post; that is, after all, its essence.

Notably, Cohen's opposition to Polanski's punishment ("it’s alright with me if Roman Polanski is freed") matches almost verbatim his similar defense of Casper Weinberger ("Cap, my Safeway buddy, walks, and that’s all right with me"). That, in turn, is entirely consistent with Cohen's outrage over Lewis Libby's prosecution for obstruction of justice ("As with sex or real estate, it is often best to keep the lights off") and his demand that Bush torturers and war criminals be similarly protected from consequences. The opposition to Polanski's arrest by these Post columnists is, in one sense, merely a natural extension of their general view that criminal prosecution and prison is for the dirty masses but not for elites like themselves.

[...]

For every brutal, lawless and amoral act, there is a defense of it to be found on the Washington Post Op-Ed page.

That pretty much nails it.

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"The Left" Strikes Again!

Neo-neocon bring her mad yoosta-bee skillz to the Polanski issue:

The reaction of no small number of pundits on the Left to the Polanski case is to recommend that we let bygones be bygones.

Amusingly, the post goes on to engage in some speculation about the motives of these dastardly "pundits on the Left" without getting around to naming any of them or their their alleged specific arguments, which one would think would be necessary for her project. And the reasons for this are obvious: leaving aside Hollywood directors/writers and mediocre French "philosophers" (who don't fit the criteria anyway), the most prominent American pundit to apologize for Polanski has been...Anne Applebaum, whose politics are essentially identical neo-neo con. The one dismaying actual leftist exception to this is Katrina VandenHeuvel, who posted a one-line twitter agreeing with Applebaum's idiotic column, which she's partially walked back (albeit with a regrettable endorsement of Wanted and Desired.) And...that's it. (And, no, Richard Cohen really doesn't count.) Pretty thin reed to hang an indictment on "the Left," I'd have to say. (Mother Jones editor Clara Jeffrey's reactions would be far more representative.)

And now, the punchline:

But thank goodness the rank and file liberals at HuffPo and Salon don’t happen to agree with their journalist “betters” that Polanski should be let off the hook.

Yes, damn Salon for publishing so many apologies for Polanski! I'm afraid neo has a lot to learn about writing lazy indictments of "the Left"; it's generally a bad idea to even name sources, because it makes it embarrassingly obvious that you haven't even read the ones you're criticizing.

For rather more useful contributions on Polanski, see Lauren and little light. They don't even blame Polanski on the moral relativism of "the right!"

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Au revoir, les enfants

This reads like a wingnut parody of degenerate France and degenerate Hollywood engaging in an orgy of amoral pomposity. (As a lawyer I confess ignorance regarding the principle of immunity from legal process for film festival attendees).

I can only hope that most of the signatories to this kind of thing aren't actually familiar with the facts of the case. Of course that sort of selective blindness is a huge problem of its own.

As djw notes in a thread below, the worst part of minimizing Polanski's crimes is that almost all the arguments used to do so are classic rape culture tropes. (Consider the central claim of this petition, which is that Polanski was arrested on a "morals" charge, as if it were obvious that it's perfectly possible for a 44-year-old man to have genuinely consensual sex with a 13-year-old girl, let alone one he had first drugged up, and who has always insisted that she was forcibly raped).

Depressing.

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One Last Thing

I will hopefully leave this subject for a while, but before I do, for those who haven't seen Wanted and Desired I can't recommend Lauren Bans's post more strongly:

Excepting the lawyers who worked on the case, the majority of the voices in the film are Polanski’s Hollywood friends, and they make great strides to point out the “reputation” of the victim. More than two people note that the girl was not a virgin. In a clip that made me want to stab out my eyeballs, one female friend of Polanski’s goes so far as to mention that the girl’s mother introduced herself to Polanski as “an actress” and then asks, “Why would her mother let her daughter go to a photo shoot alone with him in the first place?” Oh yes, I see, clearly her mother deliberately set her up to be raped in order to advance her career! Now there's some stellar logic fit for inclusion in a documentary.

I had read enough about the film to expect it to be somewhat tendentious. But absolutely nothing prepared me for the extent to which Zenovich allowed various Polanski allies to smear the victim with reactionary and misogynist stereotypes, made all the worse by the fact that she chose to excise the most important parts of the victim's grand jury testimony. And the fact that so many reviewers ignored this elephant in the room while describing the film as persuasive or even-handed is also dismaying, and sadly instructive about the power that retrograde sexual politics still holds over too many people.

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Crime and punishment

Several commentators in the Polanski thread are apparently taking the view that if a particular exercise of criminal punishment is unlikely to deter crime or rehabilitate the offender, then punishing the offender is pointless at best if not actually barbaric.

Leaving aside the question of whether or not punishing Polanski would deter anyone from committing rape in general or child rape in particular, I find it odd that some people so easily dismiss the idea that Polanski should be punished because he deserves to be punished. One doesn't have to be a strict Kantian to accept the idea that a person who commits a henious crime should be punished irrespective of whether the punishment specifically deters the offender, or generally deters others from committing similar acts.

For example, I imagine hardly anyone would accept the idea that if Polanski had murdered his victim it would be wrong to punish him unless one could show the punishment was likely to deter murder.

All of which is to say that arguments about how there's no "point" in punishing Polanski now are only plausible to the extent that it's accepted that what Polanski did wasn't a particularly serious crime.

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Polanski Addenda

• See Harding, McEwen, and Hess. Eugene Robinson's column on the subject is so good that I suspect that as we speak Fred Hiatt is firing him so he can buy Anne Applebaum and Richard Cohen more crayons. Speaking of Applebaum, I guess one of the topics at that blogger ethics panel is going to have to be "dishonest or inept?"
• Reading comments here and elsewhere it seems that the leading non-insane line of defense seems to be a porkbusters-type argument -- i.e. given California's fiscal problems why are they spending money to put away an old man? These arguments are perhaps even less persuasive than most such arguments. Like all porkbusters arguments, it has the obvious problem that the money involved is, in the context of California state expenditures, trivial. And while the isolated programs identified by porkbusters are sometimes (though not always) genuinely wasteful, compared to the other things the prosecutor's office might plausibly spend money on bringing a child rapist who fled the jurisdiction seems pretty comfortably above the median in terms of priorities to me. Certainly, people making this argument explaining why we should assume that money that isn't used on the case of the fugitive child rapist will be used in a clearly more efficient manner.
  
• A related good point from Daniel Davies: "I hesitate to even make this point because I have so far had little success in finding a way to express it which doesn’t look like trivialising the actual crime, but more or less notwithstanding the crime, there has to be a general principle of especially harsh treatment of fugitives from justice. The system has to defend itself against people who undermine its authority by trying to lead lives which publicly flaunt the fact that they have escaped the prescribed social sanctions."
• Leaving aside the fact that nominally "consensual" sex between a 40 year-old and a (drugged) 13 year-old is plenty horrible, people asserting that what Polanski did isn't "rape-rape" really do need to come up with some evidence that the victim lied to investigators and then lied under oath to a grand jury.
• I'm glad JMM at least fixed his link to Wyman's excellent review of Wanted and Desired.
• And a good point here: I don't recall many people rushing to argue that we should just live-and-let-live with elderly priests who molested children. Although I guess those victims were often boys, so they count more, and they probably weren't sluts whose mothers totally set them up.
  

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The Polanski Arrest

You've probably heard that Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland. I think this is a very good thing, and find most of the outrage over it baffling.

One thing to note here is that Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired was an absolutely appalling whitewash. Bill Wyman has a great deal of detail about this, but you know that you're in for a disgraceful rape apologia when early on the film conveniently truncates the victim's testimony before she actually describes the rape, preserving the illusion that it's a "he said/she said" case even though if you pay attention you'll notice that nobody actually disputes her version of events. The film's portrait of the judge is just as sloppy and morally odious; it's not just that the details about his life are both irrelevant and not very damning (he may have had sexual relations outside the sacred bounds of matrimony! With two women!), but that the attempt to create hypocrisy where there isn't any plays into the fundamental misdirection of the Polanski camp -- i.e. that he was prosecuted for being a European roue just too sexually sophisticated for provincial Americans, not because he raped a 13-year old. And the way in which Zenovich allows people to speculate about the victim's (again, completely irrelevant even if true) possible history of consensual sex is even more disgusting, although it inadvertently reminds us that one reason she probably went along with a far-too-light plea bargain is that she wasn't looking forward to the similar victim-blaming that would have undoubtedly happened in court.

In addition to any issues with a conflict of interest, most of what Anne Applebaum says is similarly unconvincing. The fact that the victim forgives Polanski doesn't give him a license to skip out on his punishment, first of all. Even worse is her bringing up alleged "evidence that Polanski did not know her real age." Since the sexual relations were not even nominally "consensual," I fail to see how this is relevant to anything -- it's OK to rape a 16-year old but not a 13-year old? And as with Zenovich's film, the allegations of "judicial misconduct" remain frustratingly vague -- there's some evidence that he acted oddly, much less that he actually went beyond his legal discretion. In any event, the proper venue for determining whether the judge acted properly is a court of law, and Polanski has the resources to get a fair hearing.

I've said before that evaluations of Polanski's art should be kept distinct from his crimes, but this cuts both ways -- the fact that he's produced great art shouldn't give him immunity for a severe violent crime. As Kieran says with the proper acid, "I look forward to more detailed explanations of who the Real Victim is here, and more fine-grained elaboration of the criteria — other than “marvelous dinner guest” — for being issued a Get Out of Child Rape Free card."

[X-Posted to TAPPED.]

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