October 4, 2009
womanagainstrape – found three other posts in the drafts.
Polanski/Goldberg/rape posts/videos
Ms Goldberg: “It wasn’t rape rape” (video/text)
Ms Goldberg, what is “rape rape”?
Every once in a while – and always with good reason – I have an urge to call a woman a whore.
It’s usually because the woman does not meet the qualifications of being a woman – as in protecting a pedophile and making light of drugging and raping a child. Whoopi Goldberg incensed me with her ignorance – but I was not inclined to call her a whore. Ms Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post, however, is another matter. Her article alone qualified, but then it became clear she was prostituting her column and readership for her husband. Her husband – Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Radoslaw Sikorski, who said he would lobby for the pedophile’s release.
In Polanski’s native Poland, President Lech Kaczynski and Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said they would appeal to US authorities to drop proceedings against Polanski.
Fortunately, Poland’s Prime Minister DONALD TUSK does not believe “one can use the term ‘human’ for such individuals, such creatures” nor does he believe “protection of human rights should refer to these kind of events”. And he’s all in favor of mandatory chemical castration for pedophiles, which according to the law, would include Polanski.
If Ms Applebaum had any integrity, she would have kept silent or at the very least included a disclaimer. She can assert these are her own views, her own words – but their purpose was clear. And what she writes as justification boggles the mind.
There must be some deeper story here, because by any reckoning the decision was bizarre — though not nearly as bizarre as the fact that a U.S. judge wants to keep pursuing this case after so many decades.
She presents her version of the facts, which don’t jive with reality, but jive with her “argument”.
Here are some of the facts: Polanski’s crime — statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl — was committed in 1977. The girl, now 45, has said more than once that she forgives him, that she can live with the memory, that she does not want him to be put back in court or in jail, and that a new trial will hurt her husband and children.
Yes, every time it is brought up she is hurt by it – because of him – and he doesn’t care.
There is evidence of judicial misconduct in the original trial.
What?
There is evidence that Polanski did not know her real age.
She met the threshold with that sentence. It doesn’t matter if she was 1 hour away from her 18th birthday – it would still be statutory rape, which is rape. Rape is a medical diagnosis – statutory rape is a legal definition – the key word being rape. She was physically raped in every way possible by a man three times her age. There is no way he didn’t know she wasn’t 18. And even if they were both 18 she repeatedly said no. Rape is rape.
He has never been convicted of anything else.
Convicted being the operative word. He raped a child and then shortly after he fled he talked about how “everybody likes to f**k young girls!”. The odds that he hadn’t done it before or since is zero. And if a murderer flees and never commits another murder, he shouldn’t be sentenced for the crime he committed?
Now listen to how he has “paid for his crimes”:
He did commit a crime, but he has paid for the crime in many, many ways: In notoriety, in lawyers’ fees, in professional stigma. He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar. He cannot visit Hollywood to direct or cast a film.
What?
She compares those “many, many” (four) things to raping a child. Professional stigma? What about the stigma of the child he raped. She was painted a Lolita, her friend’s parents wouldn’t let her go over to their house and her teenage sons have access to her testimony. Everything mentioned is Pedophile Polanski ‘s fault. Had he not raped a child and had he stayed and received his punishment for the crime of rape he pled guilty to, none of those things would have happened.
He can be blamed, it is true, for his original, panicky decision to flee.
And how panicked was the little girl he raped? So panicked she tried to leave and he pulled her back and started raping her all over again. She wasn’t allowed to flee, wy should he?
But for this decision I see mitigating circumstances, not least an understandable fear of irrational punishment.
There is no proof that punishment was ever going to take place. The judge is not part of the plea deal – and he got a very sweet plea deal. But most of all, there are no mitigating circumstances to rape of a child. Period.
Polanski’s mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto, and later emigrated from communist Poland. His pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered in 1969 by the followers of Charles Manson, though for a time Polanski himself was a suspect.
All of those things make what he did more heinous. He had witnessed evil touch his family and he willingly chose to pass it along. That is not mitigating circumstances – for that he deserves extra punishment.
Polanski is 76. To put him on trial or keep him in jail does not serve society in general or his victim in particular.
How does it not serve society in general?
He raped a child, he pled guilty to raping a child and he fled before he was sentenced for raping a child. He also has the added charges of failure to appear and fleeing the jurisdiction to avoid punishment.
Bottom line: He pled guilty to a crime and fled before he was sentenced.
What about Nazi War criminals? They’re older than 76 and some of their victims may have forgiven them…should they go unpunished?
If he weren’t famous, I bet no one would bother with him at all.
Hello. If he weren’t famous he wouldn’t have been allowed to plea down five felonies, he wouldn’t have been given just 42 days of “psychiatric evaluation” and it wouldn’t have taken 32 years to bring him to justice.
ANNE APPLEBAUM
Thinks rape of a child can have “mitigating circumstances”.
