Roman Polanski and the definition of rape

"How low will Hollywood go in defending Roman Polanski? said Ed Morrissey in Hot Air. Whoopi Goldberg said on The View that film director Polanski's crime 32 years ago wasn't "rape rape," which makes it sound like she thinks that drugging and forcibly sodomizing a 13-year-old girl was some kind of "Lolita situation." It's true that Polanski pled guilty to statutory rape, not actual rape, under a plea deal, but parsing the word doesn't change the crime(watch Whoopi Goldberg discuss Polanski and "rape rape").

"The reason we can all be on Polanski's side over this is not to do with what happened in 1977," said film studio executive Harvey Weinstein in Britain's Independent. "It's to do with the fact that the punishment for what happened so many years ago had already been decided" when Polanski agreed to spend time in prison in exchange for pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a minor. Polanski spent time in prison pre-sentencing but fled when the sentencing judge went back on the deal—that's why this his arrest in Switzerland was a "miscarriage of justice."

Anyone who thinks "Roman Polanski's rape trial was an open-and-shut case" should think again, said Elizabeth Snead in the Los Angeles Times. The HBO documentary film Wanted and Desired reveals the "sordid truth" behind the corrupt case against Polanski for the crime of "having sex with an underage girl." Watch the documentary and you'll see why even the victim says the trial was an injustice (watch the Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired trailer).

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"Roman Polanski raped a child," said Kate Harding in Salon. "That's the detail that tends to get neglected when we start discussing whether it was fair for the bail-jumping director to be arrested at age 76, after 32 years in 'exile.'" Any legal misconduct revealed in a documentary doesn't change the fact that even Polanski admitted that he had unlawful sex with a minor. Rushing past that point to find reasons to forgive Polanski now is "twisted."