What I am about to say is not a defence of Polanski. I will, however, say that there is a good moral argument for why Polanski should not go to jail. My argument may be considered a feminist stance. But mostly, it is a humanist stance. But first, let’s make some definitive statements:
- In 1977 Roman Polanski raped a 13-year-old girl.
- There is no moral justification for this act.
- Roman Polanski’s artistic achievements do not exonerate Polanski.
All that said, I am unwilling to join the crowds calling for Polanski’s blood. Why is this?
I have used the word “humanist” in describe my moral approach. I use this word in opposition to religious concepts of morality: the idea of imposing generalised moral codes onto a situation (good/evil, crime/punishment). The humanist approach disregards such abstract, Platonic ideas of what is the right thing to do; it first looks at a situation in its specificity, considers the people involved, and considers the way that the people involved in a situation may live in a way that maximises happiness and minimises suffering.
So I suggest that we consider the people involved in the situation:
THE VICTIM
What is remarkable from the Polanski arrest discourse is the absence of the victim. Certainly, Polanski-supporters of the Harvey Weinstein variety certainly haven’t given a second thought to her. More disturbing though is how people on the other side of the debate are more concerned with addressing the idiotic arguments of celebrities than they are in giving voice to the victim’s concerns, or if they consider the victim at all, come to the quick conclusion that what the law demands outweighs the needs of the victim.
So in what situation do we find the victim? She is 45. She has a husband and children. She remembers her rape as a terrible thing. But worse than the rape was the experience of her life turning into a media circus, so much so that the actual rape paled in comparison:
“Every time this case is brought to the attention of the court, great focus is made of me, my family, my mother and others,” Geimer wrote in her affidavit to the court. “That attention is not pleasant to experience and is not worth maintaining over some irrelevant legal nicety, the continuation of the case.”
To be clear: I quote the victim here not to make a general argument against rape trials. What is important is to acknowledge that every person experiences events differently and in the case of a specific traumatic event, we should listen to the voice of the person who experiences that trauma.
Feminist academics have written at length about victim’s lack of agency in rape trials. The defence team attempts to speak for the victim, implying that they were asking for it with evidence invariably excluding the victim’s voice. The prosecution also purports to speak for the victim, demanding “justice” even when this isn’t in the best interest of the victim. This person makes the point succinctly when discussing the rule in some jurisdictions allowing rape victims to decline from testifying even where their evidence is crucial to the case:
There are two rationales for these rules. First, there’s a belief that fewer survivors will come forward if they know they’ll be forced to testify. Second, organizations advocating for survivors have convinced policymakers that the survivor deserves to make his or her own decisions about testifying to avoid being “raped again” by the legal system. In a larger sense, rape is about loss of control so the recovery process needs to be about regaining control by making your own decisions and being respected… Polanski may have injured all of society by his crime, but Samantha Geimer was injured far more; her decisions about what she needs to get on with her life should outweigh abstract notions about our collective desire for “justice.”
From the victim’s point of view, continuing with the prosecution of Polanski is to turn her life into hell and as long as people are turning Polanski into a trending topic on Twitter, people are perpetuating her continuing rape.
POLANSKI
You may find it distasteful to consider the situation and interests of Polanski but I think it is important, even if only to acknowledge that he is a human being. How else might we think of Polanski? Harvey Weinstein would have you think that he is a noble artist. His detractors would have you believe he is an evil rapist. I would prefer not to use such labels as they could never really describe the complexity of a human being. We might hazard a guess that he has a moral centre, using his films as an indication. We can certainly say that if he does have a moral centre, he has failed to live up to those ideals. Polanski is now aged 76. He has a wife and children. He does not want to spend the remaining part of his life in prison.
Yet still, people who I respect want Polanski to go to jail because they feel that he is “getting away with it”. But here’s something to consider: Polanski has not gotten away with rape. He was arrested in 1977 for rape and has had the public shame of being a rapist attached to him since. He was sued by the victim in a personal action in 1988. This was settled in 1993, meaning that the two came to an agreement as to how he should make amends for his action in monetary terms. He has paid for his actions in various ways. He just hasn’t paid for his actions in the way the law demands. (I might also note that in being so rigid in determining Polanski’s punishment, i.e. time in jail, Polanski’s attackers are also putting a price on a woman’s body. Want to have sex with a 10-year-old? That’ll be ten years! Thank you and come again!)
THE REST OF US
So far I have painted a picture of two people who months ago were living in relative peace, who now want nothing more than to get on with their lives in the most positive way they can. And when you consider the conerns of only these two people, it’s hard to justify the law coming in and wreaking havoc with both their lives.
But what about the rest of us? Some of us want to see Polanski in prison but what stake do we have in this situation?
One of the reasons the law imprisons people is to protect society. Do we need protection from Polanski? I don’t think so. He’s an old man nearing the end of his time on earth. He’s married with all the obligations that implies. He’s a celebrity with all the scrutiny that ensures. I don’t think that Polanski is a threat to anyone while he remains on this earth.
Another reason the law imprisons people is to deter would be criminals. This is another consideration that I doubt applies to this case. That is, I don’t believe that less young people will be raped if Polanski goes to jail.
Protecting society and deterring crime are tangible reasons for imprisoning someone. But the law also offers more abstract reasons to imprison people that don’t offer any immediate benefit to anyone. These are reasons such as “the rule of law must be respected” or “crime must be met with punishment”. People who prioritise these reasons are probably coming from the perspective of Kant who argued for a rational morality in which the interests of individual dignity could be translated into universal laws. The problem with this thinking is that once morals become universal, they become irrelevant. As ideas of right and wrong crystallise into law and religion, they become rigid and incapable of dealing with the ground that is always shifting, the terrain that is forever mutating, time that is always moving. Polanski’s prosecutors would like to punish him as if it was 1977 and the law stops time for the statute of limitations, but for the people at the centre of the storm, time does not stop. It moves on and they change and what they need to get on with life changes.
I don’t want to completely dismiss the value of the more abstract “rule of law” or “crime and punishment” positions. However, I am against holding those positions up as moral truths. For remember, to do so is to value the institutions of law above the individuals they are supposed to serve.
So if what I say is true – that there is no pressing public interest, no benefit gained, in putting Polanski in prison – why are crowds of people demanding it? The reason, as I see it, is vengeance. A thirst for blood. The people want their pound of flesh. When someone commits an immoral act, we see it as our right to see that person suffer. But I don’t see how a desire for suffering can be moral in any circumstance. I would rather stress the importance of forgiveness. Always forgiveness. Forgiveness has nothing to do with the criminal act. It’s to do with letting go of hate and acknowledging even a criminal’s interest in getting on with things, with living in a positive way. Forgiveness doesn’t mean “letting off the hook”. One can forgive a criminal but require some restriction on their freedom to protect society. One can forgive a criminal but require them to recompense their victim. But when the closure we seek in trauma is motivated by vengeance, it is time to reassess our position.
It is in this light that I do not want to join the group levelling vitriol at the filmmakers who signed the petition for Polanskis release. They have not all individually had a chance to say the reasons why they signed the petition. Some might have disturbing reasons for signing the petition but in most cases I am sure this is not the case. Many of the filmmakers would sign the petition not because they have a greater capacity to excuse rape (can we even believe this of someone like Pedro Almodovar?) but because they have a greater capacity for forgiveness.
TO SUMMARISE MY CASE
- If the victim of Polanski’s crime needed him to go to jail so that she could psychologically get on with her life, it MIGHT be morally desirable for Polanski to be imprisoned. (But there are limits to even satisfying the needs of victims. We might make a statement that a criminal should do what they can to ensure their victim’s rehabilitation. If this means the payment of money, it seems entirely reasonable. If it means spending time in jail, it seems reasonable because the law says its an entitlement. What if it means paying a death penalty? What is a reasonable price to pay for rape? Why is prison a reasonable price to pay, besides the fact that law sanctions it? If the victim wants the criminal to go to prison should we be concerned that her psychological desires, what she needs to obtain “closure” are determined by what the law says should happen? In any case, the victim here does not want Polanski to go to jail. She wants the charges dropped.)
- Regardless of the victim’s desires, Polanski should go to jail if there is a tangible public interest that warrants it. I have argued above that no-one is really served by Polanski going to jail.
- Failing that, we should wish the best for both Polanski and his victim and let them continue living in the way they have been doing. At the end of the day, the collective desire to see Polanski go to jail and the feeling that to do so is a common sense logical conclusion to Polanski’s crime is a desire driven by vengeance. What this common sense conclusion actually does is cause more harm to the people involved in the situation, especially the victim.
ON VENGEANCE AND CINEMA
So why am I writing about this on Screen Machine? What does the morality of rape discourse and justice have to do with movies? I’m interested in the Polanski situation because my aversion to the battle cries of the Polanski detractors almost identically mirrored by recent aversion to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Both the Polanski situation and the Tarantino situation involve the imposition of a vengeance narrative on a morally complex situation. In both situations the easy appeal for vengeance is coming from third parties in direct opposition to the people who actually experienced the central trauma. Consider the survivor Elie Wiesel, who has spent his life either asking for silence on the Holocaust out of respect for the survivors, or dispassionate engagement. How would he feel about Inglourious Basterds, which is not a film at all about Jewish revenge but about Tarantino appropriating a historical event to satisfy his own desire for cinematic revenge?
The problem with the classical revenge genre is that it asks you to accept as rational the morality of its conventions: The film opens with a traumatic incident, say the slaughter of a Jewish family, so we are correct to expect and enjoy the quid pro quo slaughter of Nazis at the conclusion. Our relationship to law is the same as our relationship to genre: Crime must be met with punishment because the law/genre says so.
When we consider the revenge films that defy genre conventions, the weaknesses of Tarantino’s filmmaking become more apparent. In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Hana, a samurai arrives in a small town to find his father’s killer and avenge him. He feels strongly about his honour but he is also of a weak character. As he spends time in the town he forges relationships with the people of the slums, a group of children, a woman, a theatre group. By the end of the film, the revenge hasn’t occurred and the vengeance narrative will never find closure though people find a way to move on.
In light of Hana it is apparent that Tarantino is actually terrible at what is supposedly his strength: writing character. Kore-eda is attentive to the affect of time on character’s subjectivity, how they exist in a number of different worlds. Despite Tarantino’s claim that he just follows his characters and doesn’t place any impositions on them, he does place a huge imposition on them: genre. Shoshanna doesn’t kill Nazis because that’s what Shoshanna would do. She kills them because Tarantino determines that is what she desires. Her motives will never change from the time she is a teenager to the time she is an adult because of Genre. Media culture is the space in which we develop moral reasoning and I believe in the importance of developing awareness of how film texts translate events into moral lessons and the impact that can have on a society that doesn’t build up critical defences. It is lawyers’ and commercial filmmakers’ job to obey rules that have nothing to do with the reality of human existence and they must do what they have to do, but as for the rest of us, I suggest that we abandon the surety of Genre and Law for the complexity of life.
[Brad Nguyen is a co-editor of Screen Machine. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, was the film reviewer for Triple R Breakfasters and is currently based in Tokyo.]
Brad, if this isn’t a defence against Polanksi, then what is it? And how does it differ in character from the rest of the Twitter about this issue, that you so harshly call ‘continued rape’? In writing such a carefully argued defence on a blog, you invite people to respond in strong ways and therefore propogate this intrusive publicity.
As a humanist, I actually believe that this issue should be an open forum in which people can freely discuss this situation in public; people discussing morality is not a form of rape and public opinion is a whole different ball-game to the patriarchal humiliation of rape victims in courts.
It is Polanski’s fault, not ours, that all this publicity and negative attention has been generated in the first place. And it’s not just that he raped someone, but that he was a well-known figure at the peak of his career in America when he raped his victim, and that he then became notorious because he skipped out on his punishment.
Regardless of the fact that his victim has absolved him for what he did to her, or your argument that to participate in any outraged twitter about the matter is a form of continued rape against the victim, there is no doubt that Polanksi should be jailed for his crime.
Even if he’s no harm to the public, or not setting any examples to would-be rapists, the question that comes to my mind is this: does Roman Polanski really feel sorry for what he did? If so, why has he spent his life avoiding those countries where he know he might be apprehended? Why did it take 10 years before the victim felt it was finally high time that she sue for compensation? Why did it take 5 years after that for a settlement? This time lapse stinks of someone who is resistant to saying or being truly sorry.
I bet he feels sorry now. He’s probably thinking now that maybe he should have faced up to the consequences of his crime when he was charged. It seems he has been more than happy to live a life of freedom with his ‘public shame’ as a trade off in order to avoid the punishment. He knew it was a risk when he committed the crime in the first place. He had the power to put that rampant publicity (that continues to torture his victim) to sleep back in ‘77. It’s HIS fault, not ours.
We can argue black and blue about whether or not imprisonment is an appropriate form of punishment. But it seems pointless. The point here is that unless Polanski had his head in the sand in ‘77, it is simply not possible that he didn’t know before he committed the crime that he would be up for something along the lines of incarceration for the rape of a minor.
If he spent years campaigning against the American law and its punishment system and visiting rapists in jail, then maybe we could respect him as someone who stands for something outside the established law. If he’d done years of community service off his own back for victims of sexual aggression, then maybe we’d really know that he is sorry and there’d be good reason not to incarcerate him.
But no, he hasn’t, and so yes, I am baying for vengeance against Polanksi because I don’t believe that he has demonstrated that he deserves his freedom.
When I say I am not defending Polanski, I do so to make clear that I am not trying to justify what he did. I am arguing that more important than justice is living as best we can in the present.
You are correct that this article is adding to the media surrounding this case which is certainly not desired by the victim. But more than taking a stance on this single issue, I’m trying to make a statement about judgement, the way we look at a situation and decide what is right and wrong.
You say that “there is no doubt that Polanski should be jailed for his crime”. Why jail? Why is that a response to wrongdoing? Who does it serve? How did you form such a quick response that Polanski should be jailed? Why was your response not that he should be whipped in public? Why is the law right in the punishment it prescribes?
If your only concern is that Polanski should feel sorry for what he did, why are you asking that he go to jail? What is the correlation between jail and repentance? Do you demand repentance of a shark that kills a diver? If the shark was to roam free, is that a case of injustice?
I agree that skipping the country probably caused the victim more grief. But it is also understandable to run away. Would you judge Polanski for running away if there was a death sentence involved? What do you think of the victim sympathising with Polanski running away, given the alleged corrupt prosecutor?
You say he doesn’t deserve freedom. Is freedom a privilege? Is freedom a property that can be bartered?
So no, I completely disagree with your statement that it is “obvious” that Polanski should be jailed for his crime.
I think I need to put that more succintly:
Putting someone in jail is an entirely artificial response to a rape event.
The law has naturalised the idea that putting someone in jail is “justice”, precisely the same way that religion naturalises the idea that sodomists should go to hell.
I’m concerned that people make moral judgements based on superficial constructs, rather than looking at the specifics of a situation and making deeper moral inquiries.
How are you weighing your desire for vengeance with the desires of the victim?
This was a really well-written piece. I have been actively avoiding this story in the media, and I think it’s because I feel confused about exactly what stance to take.
I fully understand where you’re coming from in prioritising the needs of Polanski and his victim, and although I wouldn’t necessarily see incarceration as the answer, I do believe in the importance of his trial. Whether or not he has sufficiently ‘paid’ for his crime is for a judge and jury to decide, but for all the reasons that law exists, it is important for a trial to take place to decide that, and to categorically restate the law’s stance on rape (regardless of who the rapist is/what their artistic achievements have been).
Repentance often has a role in considering sentencing, but not in whether or not their crime should be judged before the law. Also, I really feel the shark analogy could have been re-thought…
I was tossing between using a shark metaphor and a schizophrenic metaphor: I thought the shark metaphor was potentially less controversial.
You are right Brad; jail is not necessarily the answer for this case. But if not jail, then what? I realise that Polanksi was victimised by the courts he was dealing with, and that his fleeing was more of a response to a legal system that was sucking the case for all it had, not so much a denial of his responsibilities for his crime. The complexity of the trial is supposed to well-covered in a doco I’d love to see, “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired” (http://www.hbo.com/docs/docuseries/romanpolanski/).
But I still don’t think he has ‘paid’ for what he did and incarceration was the ‘bargain’ he entered when he committed his crime. I want to know if Polanski’s fleeing and life afterwards was just a big ‘fuck you’ to the legal system that was fucking him over, or has he really engaged with the ideas you have been discussing about what constitutes real justice and how this differs and is better than vengeance.
I find it appalling that people hunt sharks after they have done what is supposedly in their nature; preying upon humans and other living creatures for food. But we can’t communicate with sharks, we do not share their world and being eaten alive is a price we unfortunately have to pay for being in their territory. We do share a world with men who are rapists and we can communicate with them. That is why there are now laws against rape; as imperfect as the law and its punishments are, they are there to deter and send a message. It’s an imperfect system, but that is one of the reasons why people get hysterical when someone is seen to ‘get away with it’.
I hold to my belief that Polanski is not exempt from his crime and that he has not been properly punished for the sake of the wider society. But if we’re going down this better humanist path of non-vengeance, and if we are going to talk about alternative forms of punishment, let’s presume Polanksi has used his film making in the past thirty years as a way to explore his morality and confront his actions. You know more about Polanski’s films than I do… how do his films reflect men’s relationships with women? How has he engaged with ideas of law/society versus individuality? I genuinely would like to know how Polanski’s reality might be reflected in his films.
I’m actually not keen to talk about “payment” for crime. I think another paradigm is needed to talk about responses to rape. Because on the flip side, you are arguing that someone can buy rape (the purchase price being the appropriate time in jail or whatever).
I’ve thought a bit about the “repentance” aspect too. Repentance is important for a number of reasons: (1) Repentance may be a sign that Polanski is no longer a threat to society. But we no longer need that sign. (Of note is that Polanski undertook psychological testing in prison and was released after 42 days.) (2) The victim may need repentance to attain the closure she needs for rehabilitation. Again, in this situation, the victim has forgiven Polanski. She has made remarks about how the justice system treated them both unfairly.
Failing those reasons, jailing Polanski for lack of repentance is to jail someone for having bad thoughts and I don’t see how this is “justice”.
I’m not interested in discussing Polanski’s films post-1977 because I feel like doing so is going down the path of accepting that Polanski’s art could somehow exonerate his actions. (I don’t think that anything could exonerate Polanski. That’s why I don’t feel like demanding a specific punishment. All I can demand is that people be allowed to be happy.)
Why does Polanski need to be “properly punished for the sake of the wider society”? I am still interested in hearing your thoughts on balancing these wider society needs against respecting the agency of the victim.
If, as someone who has a law degree, you are working within the system to try and change the way society sees rape as an economic exchange, that is awesome. You are a better person than I, because, considering the circumstances of both these parties, you do want these individuals to be happy, to let sleeping dogs lie and to change the way we perceive punishment as vengeance. Empathetic legal workers are what the world needs.
I am quite naïve to the law and the dynamics therein. I certainly hadn’t thought of my attitude to vengeance for rape as a ‘buying off’ of rape and it is something to consider for sure. But now, I am also trying to think through the relationship the ‘general public’ (whatever that means) has with the law, especially when they respond to a case like this with such morally charged fervour.
No doubt, the courts and media at the time of this case beat up the publicity for all it’s worth because of Polanski’s high public profile. It became all about Middle America versus the elite of Hollywood. Earlier on, you were saying that the media and public at large had a role in the continued rape of the victim, despite her wishes that everyone would just shut up about it. But I think it’s a bit idealistic and unrealistic to expect everyone in the public sphere to just to stop talking about it in order to respect the victim’s wishes; rape happened to her, but rape is much bigger than her. It happens to millions of boys, girls, men and women everywhere, and that is why this case touches a raw nerve.
What I am trying to get at is how exactly is the public sphere related to the law and is it really implicated in the awfulness and destruction of trials that catch public attention? Does my opinion that Polanski is ultimately responsible for his actions and that he should repent in some dramatic way really make a difference to the way the law functions?
I don’t think it does, actually. It might if I found myself entwined in a real-life case of this nature, but as a spectator with a (somewhat perverse and morally charged) right to comment, it really doesn’t relate to the law directly at all. On a really base level, Polanski inspires anger in me. My opinion and my feeling is mixed up with hypothetical questions about whether Polanski has repented; I am thinking of him as a man who has raped and who does not appear to be sorry for it in the ‘crime and punishment’ theatre of it all. Having been part of this debate, I now want to know how his part in this public theatre has played out in his creative work. It’s something I might look into myself, trying to keep an open mind with all these factors in play.
Brad, your argument is totally hypothetical. There is no way currently to provide a humanist response to this incident. Unless you are suggesting this case might bring about changes to the American legal system (and I don’t think it will), the only punitive response available is incarceration.
Just because it is an old case, just because the victim doesn’t particularly want it, just because the legal system fucked him the first time- the fact remains, he evaded punishment. The only punishment currently available is imperfect- but so is our response to murder, to theft, to most things. Most of the legal system is pretty imperfect, being as it is, predicated on the idea of jail being a good place to rehabilitate.
However, the only tool currently available to us to communicate to future and past vitims of rape that their rights, freedom and safety are valued by society is to put their rapists in jail. This is what it culturally means to put someone in jail for rape: it means we give a shit in the first place that they were raped. I think when you let a man like Polanski “get away” with it – what you are saying as a society is that we won’t protect women and children.
So I don’t believe jail rehabilitates, I don’t believe it deters in most cases, but if this is the only good reason to put someone in jail, ever, for anything – I think it’s still a pretty fucking compelling one.
Until the legal system changes to reflect a greater moral complexity this is the only avenue open to us. Arguments like yours surely could contribute to change, but I believe all this energy and passion in aid of a shitty little misogynist like Polanski is energy misspent, Brad. You should go and volunteer in a women’s shelter if you want to get a real feminist perspective on rape and the law.
The truth is, to put your faith in law is to signal that you don’t “give a shit” about rape victims.
The rape victim in this place is not hypothetical. She is a real person. You are prioritising legal needs over human needs.
Once again I need to make clear that this article is not just about Polanski: It’s about how we let our morals be defined by legal/religious institutions.
Yeah, but I’m saying we are social animals- our needs are inter-dependent. It’s not just about individuals. The law is important beyond the individual circumstance. Are you advocating for a totally case by case approach? If so, why stop at rape? Surely there are countless mitigating and complication factors involved in any criminal case? Why do we put murderers in jail? Any victim of crime risks being re-traumatized by trial, not just rape victims. And there are plenty of rapists who don’t go to jail.
I mean, I’m not saying that your argument is inherently wrong, or that the current system is right- I’m just saying: it’s all a bit bloody arbitrary. To make an exception for Polanski (for Polanski!) would make no real sense to me. I don’t see this as a searing example of injustice to rape victims.
Yes. I am arguing for a case by case approach. Not for the law, but for our own moral judgement. Life is always case by case. We should not be so eager to give up our capabilities for moral reasoning.
And yes, my argument extends to our moral judgement of all crime. I have no problem with that.
And you still haven’t acknowledged the specific victim in this case and her needs. I think people who call for Polanski’s imprisonment should at least grapple with how much her needs are in issue but they seem to be whitewashed.
Polanski is not an exception to a rule. He is a specific situation like every other circumstance is a specific situation that should be treated as such.
Moral judgements are not objective- you cannot rationalize them. They are deeply personal, emotional and unstable. You cannot legalize morality. Yes, the legal system heavy handed and blunt, and will be until we have the resources to approach the moral complexity of the world properly. But in the meantime I am not equating the legal system with morality. I think Polanski is a mysoginistic creep for numerous reasons that don’t neccessarily mean he should go to jail. Funnily enough, you have made an effort to hystericize your opposition as a way to discredit them, and this in itself is a typically legalistic ploy.
In terms of the victim- the very fact that the victim has stated that she has moved on and doesn’t see the need to imprison Polanski says to me that this is purely a legal process that is being followed to it’s conclusion. Her problem with the process has been that the huge media focus on the case means she has constantly been subjected at various points through her life to reliving the event, had to endure slanderous insinuations about herself and her mother (that she was a precocious slut, and that her mother was basically pimping her out- an allegation that was again repeated in defence of Polanski recently) and has had to live in the public spotlight, when she would prefer not to. This would seem to me to be a problem with the media and with society, rather than the law itself. As Maggie pointed out, the fact that Polanski fled in the first place has also made this a drawn out process for her. The fact that she has avowedly moved on and forgiven is only testament to her resilience, and not a moral reflection on Polanski.
From CNN:
Geimer was particularly upset when prosecutors filed a fresh version of the entire 1977 grand jury transcript, replete with all the lurid details. “True as they may be, the continued publication of those details cause harm to me,” she wrote in January. “I have become a victim of the actions of the district attorney.”
She said she was happy when he left the country because his departure eased the intense public scrutiny.
“Looking back, there can be no question that he did something awful. It was a terrible thing to do to a young girl,” she wrote in her Los Angeles Times piece. “And honestly, the publicity surrounding it was so traumatic that what he did to me seemed to pale in comparison.”
She continued,”People don’t understand that the judge went back on his word. They don’t know how unfairly we were all treated by the press. Talk about feeling violated! The media made that year a living hell and I’ve been trying to put it behind me ever since.”
My position on all this, and I feel it’s one that has been underrepresented in discussions of the case, comes closest to Jessie’s.
I basically can’t see the point of taking a moral stance on the case at all, or of injecting one’s personal, emotional feelings about the matter into discussions of it (these amount to basically the same thing). I look on the media frenzy surrounding the case with something approaching bemusement.
It seems to me that, given the lives of the two principle individuals since the crime, and the stated feelings of the victim, the issue of the rape itself is largely irrelevant, which is to say that the crime itself is no longer the problem. And so discussions of the morality of rape, victimhood, suffering, and rehabilitation, are moot.
The problem is that Polanski fled.
It just seems practical that, given the demands of society and the law, it should not be permissible for the perpetrator of a crime to flee from justice, most especially when the facts of the crime are not in question. I hold no opinion on what punishment Polanski should receive for his crimes, whether now or back in the 70s, just that it was wrong for him to jump bail, and it is that wrong that presently needs addressing.
As Jessie has suggested, the ability of a state to apprehend and punish criminals is essential to operations of society. While acknowledging the extremely important points Brad makes about a humanistic approach, and the inflexibility of the law, I think it is right, or perhaps merely acceptable, that the practical should outweigh the ideal in such matters.
Thus, while I don’t find myself with a personal stake in the case, or with much of a clear emotional reaction either way, it seems evident to me that the arrest and pending extradition of Polanski is eminently justifiable, and I’m not sure why anyone would bother to claim otherwise.
Also Brad, that last paragraph on genre and the law is pretty great (even if I do still think you have Inglourious Basterds all wrong).
Thanks James,
I agree with you: We don’t have a stake in this really, don’t have any idea of the specific relationships between the players. Detachment is a reasonable position to be in.
And sure: It’s reasonably straightforward that according to the law, Polanski should go back to the U.S. and that it is practical in this sense. (But note how ready the public can be to reject other country’s legal systems: Like the treatment of Australian drug runners in Asia. Also, Switzerland is not legally obliged to handover Polanski so even the notion that sending Polanski to the U.S. is a legal imperative is up for question: Who’s law? Who’s jurisdiction?)
My issue is that people have turned this into a moral issue at all. It’s really people’s moral certainty I am concerned about; their outrage. Where the law is certain, I feel that commentators could benefit from moral uncertainty.