potential cleaning of my friends list: my take on Roman Polanski

[drewkitty]

Roman Polanski did nothing that doesn't happen in Hollywood every day.



Armed with alcohol, drugs, prestige and ruthlessness and shielded by reputation and the support of their peers, sordid moguls take advantage of innocent children. They know they are doing wrong, there is no excuse.

I am not outraged by what he did, if only because it is so sadly commonplace. I am outraged by two other factors.

1) It continues to happen every day, and somehow the Hollywood celebrities think that this is somehow OK because money and power washes away sin. (I'm not big on mortal sin, but nonconsenusal sex and child molestation certainly count in my book, and this was both.) Hollywood Boulevard is full of the human wreckage that results. If you are local to L.A., you can see the pimps and players working the runaways that arrive at the Greyhound bus stations.

2) In our eagerness to give Polanski either an undeserved free pass or a drive-by drubbing, we bring our own prejudices and life experiences to the situation. We blame Polanski, who is a tired old director with issues who needs a short stay in prison and the rest of his life in probation and community service -- but we let our cultural leaders off the hook, who create and condone this sort of thing not just in Hollywood but around the world.

From Oakland to Thailand, from San Francisco to New Orleans, *rape is not supposed to be OK*. Yet we have a petition going around that says it is.

"His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978 against the filmmaker, in a case of morals."

Where are the celebrities speaking out and saying clearly, "No, this is not OK?" Where are the billboards with 800 numbers, the celebrities who spend their time in the Hollywood bus station and on the streets where their stars are, the community outreach and the financial support? Where are the detectives knocking on doors? The social workers?

Where is the outrage?

Links:

http://www.rainn.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Polanski

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/roman-polanski/story?id=8705958

http://www.indiewire.com/article/2009/09/29/over_100_in_film_community_sign_polanski_petition/

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090613132146AAoIB5m

http://www.covenanthouse.org/ 1-800-999-9999 and http://www.nineline.org/

http://www.covenanthouse.org/houses/california

Comments

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

I made a conscious decision, very early on, to not have an opinion about Roman Polanski, and I'll tell you why: just in the first few months of the case, let alone over the intervening decades, literally everybody has changed their story at least once. Polanski has. The victim has. The judge has. The prosecutor has. Everybody is lying about this case.

My gut instinct is that justice would have been served by the original plea bargain; once Polanski was told (whether it was true or not) that the prosecutor and the judge were conspiring to lock him up for longer than that, for political reasons, I don't blame him for running.

I keep hearing reports from actresses, as well as from singers and from models, that the "casting couch" lives, and that when someone makes your ability your ability to work in your field dependent on having sex with them, there is no such thing as consent. It's all rape. And on those terms, there's enough testimony out there to convict just about every agent, director, and producer in both LA and NYC. And yet mothers continue, all these decades after Polanski, to do what the victim's mother did: help their daughters, even their underaged daughters, primp and style themselves to be as sexy as possible and then deliver them to the producers. It's unambiguously socially sanctioned rape. There isn't any part of it that doesn't disgust me. Which is the other reason why I'm a little bit hesitant to see Polanski singled out.

I saw something the other day from a lawyer arguing that once the LA district attorney's office has him, they may find it impossible to convict him, predicting that the most likely outcome now is acquittal. Wouldn't that be a heck of a twist ending to the story?

[drewkitty.livejournal.com]

Acquittal on the flight to avoid prosecution is more likely due to the age of the case and the evidence of miscarriage of justice.

>> And yet mothers continue, all these decades after Polanski, to do what the victim's mother did: help their daughters, even their underaged daughters, primp and style themselves to be as sexy as possible and then deliver them to the producers. It's unambiguously socially sanctioned rape. There isn't any part of it that doesn't disgust me. Which is the other reason why I'm a little bit hesitant to see Polanski singled out.

Well said, and exactly my point -- except that I'll settle for singling out Polanski since we can't get them all as much as they so clearly deserve.